Provide a useful meta description

Summary: Meta descriptions provide extra information. They appear in search results and on some social media platforms.

Meta descriptions provide extra information to help users find what they’re looking for. They supplement page titles.

How to: writing meta descriptions

• Summarise or describe the content
• Write text that supports or expands on the title
• Be concise — around 150–160 characters
• Avoid very short meta descriptions
• Make all meta descriptions unique

Where meta descriptions are displayed

They are used:

• in search results (maybe - if they include the user’s search terms), below the title.
• on some social media platforms when your page is shared.

Meta descriptions don’t affect search ranking.

Like titles, meta descriptions are not visible on a web page. They’re included in the HTML source code and look like this:

<meta name=“description” content=“Your meta description is here”>

And for social media sharing, you use different tags:

<meta property =“og:description” content=“Your description is here”>

<meta property =“twitter:description” content=“Your description is here”>

Usually, meta descriptions are not generated by CMSs – you’ll need to write them.

Resources

Google (2019), Create good titles and snippets in search results