When using WordPress, Meta descriptions, Meta titles, and focus key phrases are some of the most important SEO elements of your site. If you use them properly, your pages will rank higher on search engines.
If you want to improve your website’s ranking on search engines, you need to implement search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.
When people see your pages in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), they only receive a quick peek of their content. As a result, readers must determine which results to click on based on article titles, website names, and Meta descriptions.
Meta descriptions are essential for search engine optimization (SEO). Without compelling metatext, your content may not get the attention it deserves
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What is Meta description?
A Meta description is an HTML element that provides a summary of your web page. A page’s Meta description tag appears as part of a search snippet on a search engine results page (SERP) and is designed to show users what the page is about and how it relates to their search query.
Meta descriptions for posts and pages can be customized in WordPress. If you don’t manually provide a Meta description, Google will take snippets from the pages and create a description for each.
While it may appear to be more convenient to leave this job to Google, you risk missing out on a chance to attract traffic by producing a compelling Meta description that is relevant to your audience.
How does Meta description work?
When someone finds your content through a search engine, they will normally see a title, a URL, and a short paragraph known as a Meta description:
This Meta description helps many potential visitors develop their first impression of your site. As a result, it has a huge impact on whether or not they choose to view your content.
Search engines will look for all available Meta descriptions for that particular page. If the search engine is not found, it will generate itself.
If you’ve already written a Meta description for your page, search engines will display that text on the results page instead. However, this is not always the case.
Search engines may decide that your Meta description is not relevant to your search term. In this case, search engines still get snippets of your content.
For this reason, it’s important to write a Meta description that includes your focus keywords and is relevant to your content. Also, to get people to visit your website, it must be attractive and well-written.
How Long Should a Meta Description Be?
Google has changed the maximum length of Meta descriptions on a regular basis. There is no specific cutoff limit at the moment, although the search engine will generally display anything from 160 to 320 characters. When in doubt, write lengthy meta descriptions of up to 300 characters in length, but ‘front-loading’ the most crucial information so it appears regardless of how much Google decides to include.
How to write a perfect wordpress Meta description
You should now know how to add a Meta description to your WordPress website. Below is a list of best practices to ensure the Meta descriptions you create are compelling and effective.
- Consider search intent – consider what motivates people to search for a specific keyword in order to obtain the information they require. Write your Meta description so that it explains how your website’s content responds to their inquiry.
- Keep it short – No more than 160 characters or Google will cut it off. Include call-to-action terms in your Meta description if appropriate. For example, “read more,” “save money,” or “get yours” are all appropriate
- Call-to-action words – Avoid keyword stuffing by not repeating the keywords. You should ideally only use the focus key once.
- In your Meta descriptions, use researched, focused keywords.
- Always use Meta descriptions that are high to the content on each page; never use the same Meta description throughout your whole site.
- Motivate users to click by demonstrating value and appealing to their emotions.
Do Meta descriptions affect SEO?
According to Google in 2009, Meta description tags have no direct impact on a link’s ranking in search engines. This is because webmasters abused this as a ranking factor and stuffed their Meta descriptions with keywords.
However, Meta descriptions have an indirect impact on his SEO.
Search engines rank posts according to the click-through rate of links in search results. This means that if your Meta description doesn’t help your site get clicks, your rankings for various keywords will eventually drop.
That means you can use whatever words you want in your Meta description as long as you click the link in the search results. That’s what Google really cares about, after all.
Conclusion
Meta description is one of the most important elements for SEO. Each page and post must have a clear summary of no more than 155 characters, even if it doesn’t directly affect your ranking via the algorithm. This isn’t a lot of space, but it’s enough to give users a preview of the content.
Optimizing a website for search engines requires implementing a variety of techniques, large and small. Meta descriptions may seem like small items at first glance, but they are extremely valuable to both human visitors and search engine bots.
Setting up Meta descriptions in WordPress is actually a simple task. Those two steps (and a little optimization work) are enough.
- Add your own Meta description when creating a post or page.
- Create a generic Meta description for your site and content type.