What is Meta Description and why is your optimization important in the pages and posts of your site

Meta Description is a snippet of HTML code that has the function to summarize what the page deals. The summary appears only in the code and the user browses the page does not see it.

So, after that search engines failed to analyze the meta description as an important element to determine the ranking of the sites for a given keyword, many people failed to appreciate this item, ignoring it or not writing correctly.

There are, however, some very important benefits in using the meta description . To leave it aside, your company may be losing many opportunities to clicks and visits.

The current role of the Meta Description

The meta description is very important role in two of the major sites of most traffic sources: search engines and social media.

Search Tools

In search engines, even if it does not contain as rankeamento factor, the content meta description appears on the results page as a summary just below the page title. Thus, a site that is in a worse position can earn the click if your description is more attractive. Which of the two results below seems to draw more attention?

Another important item is that if the keyword searched appear throughout the specification, it appears in bold, thus gaining greater prominence and increasing the chance of click:

Obs .: in most cases Google uses the meta description on the results page, but there is no requirement that. Occasionally the engine itself chooses some other page section and displays it as summary.

Social media

Some of the major networks such as Facebook, Linkedin and Google Plus, offer a page fragment highlighting a little better content.

By default, appearing in those three networks is the meta description . See the examples below:

How to make

Flicking the implementation, the meta description is used with the following code:

<Meta name = “description” content = “Here is the text summary that his company”>.

However, if your company uses the platform WordPress , there are plugins like All-in-one SEO that facilitate editing for those who do not have technical knowledge.

In addition to talk application, some observations are also important to choose what to write in the description:

Be reasonable in size

Google cuts the meta description in about 160 characters. It is necessary that the text is less than that to appear correctly.

very short descriptions also do not usually work well, as they seem to be incomplete.

Look for something objective and interesting

Occasionally we see some little objective descriptions, which do not say exactly what the visitor will find on the page.

Another mistake is not strive to create an attractive text. type descriptions “This is a page about marketing” should not work well: we must arouse curiosity or show that solves a problem.

Also remember to use the important key words of the page as it will be bolded when they appear as search results.

Use calls-to-action

It is always positive to indicate clearly to the visitor what your company wants him to do. “Click and read more” is an example of call-to-action that applies to the situation.

test

We’ve talked on the blog about the use of Adwords as a test tool .

Even in the case of Adwords is less descriptive text (two lines of 35 characters), you can then test which the most relevant points for visitors and then better prepare these items in the meta description.

Where to start

Ideally, all new pages have your description so published. However, this does not usually happen and in most cases a retroactive work is necessary to recast these texts on the pages that already exist on the site.

To find out where it is worth moving, our recommendation is to analyze the most visited pages originating from sites where the meta description is important: Google, Facebook, Google Plus and Linkedin.

This can be done in Analytics, analyzing the tab “content” and stating “origin” as a secondary dimension:

The Facebook Insights for sites that already present here on the blog, indicates the most tanned site content on Facebook.

Another useful tool is the Google Webmaster Tools . On the “traffic”, there are “activities” in the “markings report +1”. In this item you can see which pages were shared on Google Plus.

On the same tab “traffic” there is also the “search queries”, which indicates the times in which your site appeared in search results. Many appearances and few clicks can indicate opportunity to improvements in the meta description .

Regardless of the results of these surveys, we recommend reviewing pages that are clearly important to your business: Home, product pages and blog home page.