What are Meta Descriptions?

Today we’re looking at meta descriptions, also referred to as meta tags, which come into play when optimising your website (SEO).

Ever wondered where those little descriptions of websites come from in the Google search results?

Well, they’ve typically been written by the person that made the website in the first place! They’re written up in the code at the back-end of the website, so you might not even be aware of them, but we’re writing up meta descriptions quite a lot here at Vital Hike! Creating compelling meta description content is part of our SEO package.

So let us shed a little light on the subject for you…

What are Meta Descriptions?

Basically, they’re the blurb for each page of your website. They provide a general idea on the content

of the page. You, or your SEO web team, will write one up for each webpage of your website, making each one unique!

You may have noticed that meta descriptions in Google are all generally the same length. Google only displays a certain amount of characters, so technically you could write a lot more but it will be wasted. With this in mind, it is generally recommended that you aim for under 160 characters when writing a meta description, as you want Google to display it fully!

What are they used for?

Meta descriptions are used by Google to provide people with more information on their search results. So whilst meta descriptions will not boost your page rankings, they are vital for improving your click-through rates from search engine page results!

 Here is our meta description above!

In principle, they should improve your website performance, as people will be clear on what your pages are about. Without a meta description, Google will usually just display the first few lines of text that are on your webpage, which may not be useful at all...

Why should you use meta descriptions?

Firstly, this is your chance to market your page, in a limited number of characters, to your ideal customers!

Secondly, well-placed keywords make your website look more useful… When someone searches for something on Google, the words they use could be considered ‘keywords’. So when you do a search for “vital hike online”, Google will highlight those specific words in your search results, as you can see below!

Google has made the keywords of this search (‘vital’, ‘hike’, ‘online’) bold; I’ve underlined them above. Even the keywords in the URLs are made bold! So if you write up your meta descriptions, you can sprinkle them with keywords that are relevant to your website, along with some compelling content and Google will highlight the keywords in searches.

The idea behind this is that if your website has the keywords the customer searched for, then your website should stand out more in the search results, making you look like the best option for the customer.

You can see now why it was tempting years ago to litter your meta descriptions with keywords that make no real sense… Your website probably would have popped up in search results for a more varied range of searches. Nowadays though, the meta description is written for the customer, not for Google (not 100% for Google anyway), since Google doesn’t factor them into their ranking system. 

And when writing for people, instead of computers, you have to make it readable!

So instead of keyword stuffing like this:

• Shoes, fly, ladies shoe, footwear, adidas, Dundee, etc.

You should write something like this:

• Shauna’s Shoe Emporium stocks high-end ladies shoes, from top brands like Fly, Adidas, Reebok, RocketDog and more. Visit our Dundee shop today.

This gets across a decent number of keywords in 2 sentences that make sense. Writing engaging meta descriptions for your website focussed around a few keywords, could improve the click-through rate from Google search results, so it's worth taking your time on.

As mentioned previously, when you don’t enter meta descriptions, Google will usually just display the first few lines of text on the page, and this means you’re missing out on a chance to market your page effectively. However, sometimes it’s best not to use meta descriptions…

When should I NOT use meta descriptions?

Roughly 10% of the time, a meta description might be more of an obstacle to Google than a help. It really depends on the content of your page.

Generally, if your page is targeting only a few key terms like “Shoe Shop Dundee”, “Ladies Shoes Dundee”, and “ Adidas Shoes Scotland”, then you should probably write a meta description. With the meta, you can appeal to the 3 different customers searching for these terms.

If there are more than three keywords you’re targeting, for example, if the webpage contains a multitude of blog posts, then it can be best NOT to write up a meta description. You can only fit a certain number of words in a meta description, and since you can’t just stuff it full of keywords, you’re never going to be able to cover the sheer amount of keywords on a page like this. If you stick a meta description on this page, it will actually work against you, as you are telling people you only have the keywords in the meta tag, when in fact there are loads more that you couldn’t squeeze in!

With no meta in this case, Google should extract the keywords from the webpage, and display it as a faux-meta description in search results for that keyword. You can’t rely on this being accurate, but sometimes it’s worth the risk.

And for everyone hoping to hit page one of Google with a fine meta description… Google has stated previously that meta descriptions will not affect your page rankings.

Why does Google ignore meta descriptions for page ranking?

You’d think it would be useful information for Google to use, but that’s the problem. Around a decade ago, too many people were thinking like this. Back then, search engines did look at meta descriptions and people resorted to just stuffing them with keywords to rank higher. So a multitude of shoe shops would just dump ‘shoe shop’ keywords in their meta tag, and they would all invariably end up with the same meta descriptions:

Shoes, girls shoe, boys shoe, trainers, heels, ladies,
mens shoes, blue shoes, suede shoes, black shoes… etc, etc.

This essentially made the meta description worthless for search engine rankings.

We’ve spoken about ‘keyword stuffing’

in an earlier blog on Writing Web Content.

Google have said that they might look at meta descriptions in the future, but they haven’t done so for years and are in no hurry to change. Typically, these policy’s change unexpectedly, so I wouldn’t write off meta descriptions just yet.

A quick note: Meta Descriptions are separate from Google Analytics statistics. 

Google Analytics generates statistics based on customer activity on your website, 

but meta descriptions are manually written by the website owner (or Vital Hike!)to describe a page.

That’s all from us on meta descriptions for today; we hope you leave a little wiser about website creation than when you came! If you have any advice or questions about meta descriptions, then get in touch and we’ll be happy to chat.

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