What is a Meta Description?
Have you heard of meta descriptions? Not sure exactly what they are? You have come to the right place!
We are going to discuss what they are, why you need them and who uses them.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter will read your meta description. Save it to their database and show it to potential customers on each platform.
An engaging description will increase traffic to your website. We call this the Click Through Rate (CTR) and descriptions can help improve this.
By the end of this article, you will be a meta description expert. Let's get started.
What is a Meta Tag?
The meta description is a type of meta tag.
“Steve, what is a meta tag?”
OK, ok. Let's take a step back. What is a meta tag?
A meta tag is a special HTML tag that you add to your web page. Web crawlers visit your site and read the contents of the page. Meta tags give information about the page to these web crawlers.
So when a Googlebot visits your page it reads the meta tags and saves this information to its database.
Meta tags are not shown on your page. So when a user visits your page they are not able to see the meta tags as you hide them in the HTML.
To hide these tags, place them between the <head> tags in your HTML. Here is an example of where a meta tag should go on the page:
<html>
<head>
<title>My Awesome Blog Post</title>
<meta name="Description" content="My awesome blog post that tells you everything you need to know">
</head>
<body>
page contents
</body>
</html>So to create a description meta tag we add a <meta> tag between the <head> tags. The <meta> tag has the name of “Description”. It also has a content attribute with a description of the page.
<meta name="Description" content="My awesome blog post that tells you everything you need to know">This is a meta description.
A special tag added to the page to describe to web crawlers what the page is about.
What makes a good meta description?
There are some technical constraints when you are creating a meta description. For example, there is a character limit on the content of the description.
If they are not visible to the user when they visit the page why do you need to use them?
What is the use of a Meta Description?
In the early days of the internet, search engines used the meta description to rank your web page. Yet, people abused this so their site could rank higher. Blog owners and webmasters would stuff keywords into their description. This would improve their search ranking.
Google put an end to this and the meta description was no longer used as a ranking factor.
So if it's no longer used why are we adding it?
The meta description is still important today. Not for your SEO but for your CTR. That is because Google shows the meta description in the search results.
This sort of thing is always best explained with an example.
Here is the meta description for one of the pages on PageDart:
<meta name="Description" content="What is YSlow and why you should be looking to use Google Lighthouse as a replacement for web performance monitoring.">This is what that page looks like in the Google Search Results:
As you can see Google uses the meta description to show the user what the page is about.
This is why the meta description is still so important today. Writing a catchy and engaging description can make all the difference. Improving the CTR of your links in the Google Search results.
You may see some pages where Google has ignored the meta description. This is often true for older more established websites. On this page you can see that the meta description is:
<meta name="description" content="It's something that Bill Crosby once sang about, but are us Brits in line for a white Christmas this year? Sadly, anyone hoping for a blanket of snow on the ground on December 25 will be disappointed to learn that it's not looking likely. While it was a fairly common occurrence the Victorians, snowfall is becoming increasingly rare as the as world heats up. Instead, the Met">Yet, the Google search results display the following description:
This is because Google will sometimes choose to show relevant text that is on the page. This is because Google believes that this text is a closer match to the user's search intent.
Do not be too worried if this happens, it is still important to think about and write good descriptions. Social media sites also will use your page description.
Meta Description and Social Media
So far we have covered the HTML5 meta description tag. This is a standard tag that is part of the web. As a reminder it looks like this:
<meta name="Description" content="...">Facebook and Twitter have their meta description tags that you can also add to your page.
They don't use the standard meta description. They use their meta description which has a different name.
For Twitter, the name is “twitter:description”. The meta tag looks like this:
<meta name="twitter:description" content="...">So using the “What is YSlow?” page as an example, this is how the description looks when shared in twitter:
Unlike Google, Twitter will not replace the text. It will always use what you have inside the meta description tag. Here is the description for the news article “snow white Christmas”:
You can check how your web pages look by using the Twitter Validator. Enter a page URL into the tool and it will show a preview.
Facebook has a standard called open graph and they have a set of meta tags to add to your page. You can add a Facebook description by adding the meta tag og:description like this:
<meta property="og:description" content="...">Facebook will display this when a link to your site appears on Facebook. Facebook also has a preview tool called the Debug Tool. This is how the “What is YSlow” page looks:
This is like the Twitter validator, add your URL and then click Debug to see the preview.
Wrapping Up, What is a Meta Description?
You have now learned what is a meta description. You know that it is a special HTML tag added to your web pages.
The meta tag goes between the head tags within the HTML.
The description is no longer used by Google for ranking your page. Yet search engines show it in the search results. If the description is different in the search results, don't worry. This is because Google thinks there is a more relevant piece of text on your page.
Google is not the only service to use the description. Twitter and Facebook also use the description and display this on their site. Use the:
To test how your site looks when shown on each platform.