Whilst the meta description tag now has very little important to rankings in the search engines, it does serve a very different purpose. The simple tag allows website owners to control the small description displayed beneath the title tag/link to a website in the SERPs.

This small amount of text is extremely important for gaining a users interest and compelling them to click-through to your website, increasing the overall click-through rate of the page.

Meta Description is Your SERP Sales Pitch

The easiest way to describe what the meta description does is to compare it to a sales pitch. Your company’s sales pitch will explain to potential customers why they should use your product and what makes you better than everyone else. The meta description tag is your search engine results page equivalent, so use it!

Remember, search engines don’t use the description tag as a ranking factor anymore, so it’s easier than ever to write a description targeted directly at the users. However, this should include a keyword or two relevant to what the user would be searching to reach the page because the keywords are emboldened by the search engines and will help to make your description stand out even more.

How to use the tag

The meta description tag is very simple to use and should have the following layout:

<meta name="description" content="Write your compelling and interesting sales pitch here." />

There is however, one major restriction which you need to remember: the maximum number of characters displayed in search engines differs between 150 – 160 characters, so try and keep it between those two numbers at all times.

There is only one problem you may encounter with the meta description, and this is that search engines may overwrite your carefully-written description and instead displaying text pulled from your site which is relevant to the search. You can, however, prevent this from happening by using the following code:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />