7 Tips on How to Write a Successful Meta-Description

14 Oct 7 Tips on How to Write a Successful Meta-Description

Having an effective and well written meta-description is an excellent way to bring in and increase traffic to your website. When your sites page appears on the search engine results pages (SERPs), a good meta-description can act as a last ditch effort in order to help attract viewers to click on your link. You never know who these viewers can be, they can be a new customer, or a new client-you just never know. You don’t want to miss out on good website traffic by not putting a good amount of effort into having a well-written meta-description.

Meta-descriptions play an important role in search results and website traffic. When you search through a search engine results page, there is a snippet of information placed below the link of a search result. The purpose of this information is to catch the reader’s eye and convince them that they should click on the link and view your website. This is your last ditch effort to pull in your audience because there is a much lower chance of your page being seen the further down you are in the search results. However, even if you are at the top of the list you may still be overlooked if your meta-description is not clear and convincing.  All in all, having a well-written description increases your chances of having low bounce rate, high user click-through rate and having good, strong organic traffic. This is your opportunity to advertise your content to the viewers and grab their attention, while properly informing them about whether or not your page contains the information that they are looking for.

If you need some pointers on how to write a compelling description, check out these 7 tips on how to write a successful meta-description:

1. Do not leave the meta-description blank. Well, unless you want Google to pull and enter your content for you! Do not give up the ability to choose what message is displayed to your potential viewers or future clients.
2. Every page should have a unique meta-description, and should have a direct relevance to the page. You want to create a compelling description that will make the viewer want to click on your page. Use this opportunity, and write quality descriptions in order to tell your prospective visitors what you page is about!
3. Keywords should be included into the meta-description intelligently. Searched keywords will be in highlighted in bold within the meta-descriptions on the search results page, so this will help catch the eye of potential visitors.
4. The ideal size for the meta-description is between 150-160 characters. Search engines will generally truncate descriptions that are longer than 160 characters.
5. Add call to actions within your meta-descriptions when applicable. This means include language such as “download here”, “click here” or “find out more!”
6. If you find that certain pages are receiving a good amount of traffic, try testing out a variation of their description on another page to see if you can increase that pages traffic as well.
7. Social bookmarking sites and top social networks such as Google +, LinkedIn, and Facebook typically use the meta-description when a page is shared. When a page is posted on one of these social networks it usually pulls the meta-description and places it in the description. Remember, having a well-written meta-description can help encourage clicks to your page via social media.