Description

The meta description briefly summarizes a page and appears as a snippet in Google results. It should accurately reflect the content and focus keyword and motivate clicks. Although not a direct ranking factor, it is important for the CTR.

The description — actually called a meta-description — serves as a brief summary of a webpage, meant to describe the content, whether informative content or offers, as accurately as possible. Ideally, the focal keyword is also included in this text. The text is part of so-called meta-tags and serves, among other things, search engines like Google and their crawlers to find the appropriate HTML documents for a search query. Furthermore, the meta-description is displayed as part of the search result in the SERPs below the meta-title, which is also an important meta-tag in search engine optimization. Both belong to on-page optimization.

Written in the most appealing form possible, the description's task is to entice visitors to click. Although it is not a direct ranking factor, if it is attractively designed, it can generate traffic to a website. If users actually find what was promised and the bounce rate is therefore low, Google registers this. Thus, in this way, the meta-description is at least indirectly important for page ranking.

The description as part of the meta tags

Search engines index according to specific guidelines so that they (ideally) are found in the search index for the respective optimized keywords. For this purpose, you can store specific information for each subpage in the so-called meta tags for the search engines' spiders (also called crawlers). Among other things, meta keywords and meta descriptions are written here, which should describe the content of the website as precisely and concisely as possible. The meta tags are stored in the head section, so the crawler finds them directly at the beginning of its crawling process.

As webmasters frequently attempt manipulations in the course of search engine optimization (e.g., keyword stuffing in the meta tags), meta tags have gradually lost significance—at least partially and/or for indexing in search engines like Google. However, the description has remained of high value because, as part of the snippet, it is read by internet users in the SERPs. When combined with rich snippets, it clearly conveys what users can expect on a page. The description thus provides the first impression of a website. The goal is to write the most appealing and suitable meta description that not only accurately reflects the content but also encourages clicks. Therefore, it makes sense to integrate the focus keyword into the description.

Why must the meta-description accurately reflect the content?

Webmasters have between 155 and 160 characters (including spaces) for meta-descriptions on the search engine Google to summarize the most important information of the website for web users. This does not provide much leeway to win over visitors. One of the most important criteria here is that the description matches the content of the page. If the visitor does not find what was "promised" to them in the description, they will leave within a few seconds. If this happens frequently, the bounce rate increases and search engines "realize" that the website does not match the search query or the content is not rewarding enough, which can negatively influence the page ranking.

In a good meta description, the most important keywords are placed within the first characters and the visitor is prompted to click on the website after just a few words. In the event that you do not fill out the short description, search engines pull text excerpts from the website to display a description in the results. However, this text can be chosen so unfortunately that visitors are not very encouraged to click on the link.