Think of the description as the body copy in a search ad. This would make the result just show the title. The snippets that appear beneath your website links on the SERP play an important role in generating attention and traffic for your website.
They demonstrate your relevance to prospective readers. Meta descriptions can have a powerful impact on whether or not people click through your SERP result onto your content. Work to create descriptions that inspire and entice the user so that they are inclined to click and see what else you might have to say about the topic.
WE use cookies on our site to provide you with the best user experience. We will assume that you are agreeing to our Privacy Policy if you continue accessing this website. Read Privacy Policy. Jump to navigation. Request a demo. However, we haven't seen this full width being used, nor have we seen meta descriptions with this many characters being displayed.
In practice a significant amount of meta descriptions tags above characters are truncated so we advise you to stick to a maximum amount of characters. Although DuckDuckGo is not very informative about their advice on how to optimize pages for their search engine, our research has shown that when you stick to a maximum of characters you should be safe.
Our advice regarding the minimum amount of characters for DuckDuckGo is: 70 characters. In order for search engines and users to be able to distinguish between pages, it's vital that each indexable page has a unique meta description. Both search engines and users may think that pages are duplicates of one another if they contain the same meta description. For search engines, having duplicate meta descriptions is a signal that these pages may be duplicate pages and should therefore not be included in the search results.
The meta description is essentially your sales pitch. You need it to be great. The meta descriptions plays a major role in a visitor decision to choose which result to click on. Even though there is no direct relation between great meta descriptions and higher rankings, meta descriptions play a vital part in Search Engine Optimization:.
When it comes to meta descriptions the interests of search engines and users are very much aligned. If the written meta descriptions works well for users , the benefits from a search engine optimization point of view follow naturally. Meta descriptions heavily influence click-through-rates CTRs - the percentage of people clicking on your listing of a listing. The meta description is essentially your sales pitch, comparable with advertisement descriptions in Google AdWords.
When the meta description is missing, too long or too short, search engines may produce a description of their own. Often this is sub-optimal, as you want it to look as well as possible to entice people to visit your website. In order to drive traffic from social media it's vital to use social media markup such as for instance Facebook's Open Graph and Twitter's Twitter Cards.
This markup is used to retrieve information such as the title, description and images which should be shown on social media. Carefully choosing what social media platforms show when your page is shared leads to more visitors. If social media markup is missing, the meta description is often used as the fall-back. So if you're unable to use social media markup, having a great meta description helps drive traffic from social media. Search engines are trying to index the entire web, including PDF files.
When search engines show your PDF files in search engine result pages you want them to show an enticing meta description. A better meta description than this:. Please note that there's no easy way to define the meta description on Mac OS. There are third party tools out there which do the trick. In the end, that's up to the search engines to decide, but you can influence this by applying the best practices around writing meta descriptions.
There's a reason why you see them rarely: search engines don't like them. Even excessively using regular special characters such as dashes - , pipes or commas , can trigger your manually defined meta descriptions not to be shown. That depends. In the perfect world, each and every page within your website has a manually crafted meta description. For a website with a hundred pages this isn't an issue, but for e-commerce websites with thousands of pages this is a full-time job, and the return on this huge investment over using generated meta descriptions is very uncertain.
Define manual meta descriptions where you can really make them count. Determine which pages are most important to you, and define manual meta descriptions for these. Criteria which help here are: potential revenue, potential organic traffic, the degree in which these pages are vital to your website homepage, product category page, hubpages etc.
Meta descriptions are often generated for product pages and blog archive pages category, author, tags, date and so on. Make sure to write a good template which adheres to the general guidelines. Chances are search engines haven't visited your page yet since you've made changes to your meta description. Search engines need a bit of time to re-visit your page and process all the changes.
You wonder how long that'll take right? This varies per page. Authoritative pages and frequently updated pages are visited more often than less authoritative pages and less frequently updated pages.
Now, Google is coming back to previous limits. Best practice in , is the same as in — keep it from to characters. To check your meta descriptions, use the counter tool above. On mobile devices, the max limit is about pixels and characters.
Google shows up to pixels on a desktop. With your search results, your page title is your headline, your meta description is your tagline, and the URL is the address. Since a meta description is essentially a micro-pitch for a webpage, you should fill it with active language that will make people want to click on your result.
From this simple description in the SERP, we see this company can repair and install air conditioning a needed service in Florida. Who do you trust? A study in conducted by the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow suggested that human emotion can be categorized into four main buckets:.
Google gives room for about a sentence character summary below every search result. So, in one to two sentences, your descriptions should offer a compelling reason to visit the webpage. Add a clear call to action, address an emotional pain point, or offer a specific benefit to visitors.
It is also important to have unique descriptions for every page on your website. To encourage clicks and bring visitors from search to your website, do the following with your descriptions:. You can also check out the newest Google's recommendations - Better Snippets for your Users.
0コメント