How to Optimise Your Meta Description in 2021

A meta description is a tag that is written as a character summary of the content of a webpage. They are great for SEO as search engines like Google or Bing, will include any keywords within the meta description that are being searched for and they will also appear in the search results. Although the title of your page is a huge ranking factor your meta description is not. Instead, it acts like an advertisement for users and encourages them to click on your webpage. This is an extremely effective SEO strategy.

You may have even been influenced to click on this very blog due to the meta description we have optimised for it! Read on below to find out how you can optimise your meta description in 2021.

How Should You Format a Meta Description?

As we have already mentioned, meta descriptions are vital to get users to click on your search engine results page (SERP). It is because of this that you need to make sure the formatting of your meta description is done properly. Your meta description should read well, meaning that it should be able to be read intelligently in a natural way, without any struggles. If you are just filling your description with keywords that make no sense, then this will look unprofessional and spammy and no user will want to visit that page.

It must also be compelling and interesting as the pure intention is to attract the user to clicking on your webpage, ensure the content is relevant to the page it is describing as if not it will deter the user from visiting any more of your pages. It would also be damaging to your SEO as you may begin to rank for the incorrect keywords.

How Long Should Your Meta Description Be?

In order to optimise your meta description, you should stay within a range between 150-160 as Google will trim it down to around the same number of characters. Be aware that the ‘optimum’ length may vary depending on the content you are writing about, you may get away with writing 130-150 characters for example. Overall, however, we would suggest going within the 150–160-character mark.

Effect on Google Rankings

Although Google did announce in 2009 that meta descriptions are not taken into account in their ranking algorithm for web search this does not mean that your meta description is completely useless when it comes to Google Rankings. In fact, meta descriptions can affect the click-through rate (CTR) of a Google page and have a positive impact on its rankings.

Avoid Double Quotations

When writing your meta description, try to avoid using double quotation marks. Quotation marks tend to be used in the HTML of the meta description and the problems that could occur from this will be that Google will cut the description at the quotation mark when it appears in the SERP. The best way to prevent this happening is to just only use alphanumeric characters within your meta description.

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