The meta description effects how search engines will show snippets of your site and effects how your visitors will determine if they want to visit your site based on its description. It is definitely directly related to the chance your site will get clicked. Google chooses its snippets based on many different things, but we can control some of them through writing an effective meta description.

Improving the meta description will help you get click through from the Google page, but they won’t effect your ranking.

What is the Meta Description?

The meta description is a short description of what that page is about. It is put in the Meta tag near the top of the page and is sometimes used when a search engine shows a link to your site.

Here is an example of one:

Adding a Meta Description to your site

To add a meta description to your pages you will need to add line below in between your head tags.

<meta name="description" content="Your description goes here...">

Making a good meta description is all about making it human readable. This description should describe the page and draw people in to read the page.

Googlebot and any other web crawler could really care less what your description snippet looks like. They will always take other bits of text from the page if you descide not to include your own description, though this may not be the best description to get a person interested in clicking on the link to your page. If you really want to get your link clicked on you will want to have description nested in a meta tag on your page so that it is human readable and interesting.

When someone types in a search term in Google and hits go, there are two things that will influence a user’s decision to click on your link. The page rank order and then the page description. The order in which the links are laid out influences clicks because most people read search results from top to bottom, the higher links will usually get more attention. Google claims that most people will scan the site snippet before clicking. This is where we will separate our pages from some of the competition by creating a descriptive and interesting snippet that draws people in.

Users will scan a snippet but they are not going read it in detail. It has to be scanable. It also has to be something that is descriptive and complements the title but without repeating or having duplicated keywords. One of the most common problems with meta descriptions is that many sites either have the same one for every page or don’t even use them at all.