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How to Write Great Meta Descriptions That Get More Clicks

by bernt & torsten

You have taken all the steps to optimize your website for search engines. You have fine-tuned your site so it’s crazy-fast, images look great, and content is tagged for easier searches. The next you need to pay attention to are those 155 characters (or less) that will hook users.

You do a search of your page’s and the post’s meta description looks like this on a search engine.

You have just a tiny bit of space under the meta title and URL – and a bunch of distracting competitors surrounding it, to sell your site. The search engines aren’t giving you much room to work with, right?

Depending on how you write your meta tag, you can accomplish a lot to stand out within just that limited amount of space.

If you’ve gone through the trouble of improving your site’s ranking in search, then you need to show the same care for your meta descriptions.

Crafting a great meta description

A meta description is like a well-crafted tweet. It should be succinct, catchy, and containing keywords the readers are already talking about.

Here is how I improved my – meta description, focusing on how I share WordPress tips.

Here are some suggestions on how to optimizing your website’s metadata.

 

Don’t Copy and Paste

Don’t copy a sentence or two from your web page and call it a day. On-page content is typically written with the purpose of telling a story and guiding visitors through that story, step-by-step. Take the time to craft a unique description that sums up the entire page or post.

Limits

Stay within the character limit.

Keywords

While on-site keywording is important to your SEO efforts, so is meta description keywording. For every page and post on your site, you’ll want to have a “focus” keyword around which all your content revolves. This keyword should be present not only within the page content but also within the meta description.

Use keywords in your meta descriptions.

Users searching for those keywords might not notice the bolded keywords, but the search engines will.

Be Upfront

As with anything you publish to your website, be honest with your audience. It’s about attracting an audience that’s interested and wants to learn more. High bounce rates are sure to get you noticed by the search engines, and not in a good way.

Be Direct

Write your description directly to the user. You don’t have much room to describe your business, services, or products within those 155 characters, so don’t waste it.

Conduct Tests

If you’ve done all this and still find that organic search traffic isn’t finding your page, try testing a new description. Do a search yourself for the keyword you want to rank for. See if you can spot any trends with websites that rank on the first page of results. Then rewrite yours accordingly.

Use a Plugin

For more control over your pages’ meta descriptions, All in One SEO plugin provides you with all the metadata fields you’ll need to populate on each page, including the meta description. There’s also a character counter, so you’ll know if you’ve exceeded the maximum number of characters allowed in search.

Social Media

It’s important to optimize your meta descriptions for social media. You need to create completely unique meta descriptions to be used whenever your posts or pages are shared on major social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Conclusion

You do not do optimization once you’ve developed a website and put the pages in place. It’s a continuous exercise to chance to grab the attention of users and optimize each page and post with a click-worthy meta description.