SEO Best Practices – Meta Description Tag

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Next in our series of SEO Best Practices we examine the Meta Description tag.

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

The Meta Description Tag is a snippet of HTML code which you can find inside the <Head> section of a web page. This piece of code is normally placed after the Title tag and before the keywords tag. It doesn’t matter the order you place it in, order is not important and has absolutely NO effect on rankings.

Content management system (CMS), usually provide a field for you to complete and it is called either Meta Description or sometimes “Description”. However, on the Shopify platform the “description” field is where you place body content.

It was only a few short years ago that the keywords and other information in this tag were considered important ranking factors. Unfortunately today, neither Google nor Bing considers the description tag as a ranking signal.  This means, whether or not you use your keyword phrases, the ranking of your page in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) won’t be affected.  You could even leave it empty. When the description tag has been left empty Google has been known to fill it in.  Personally though, I always fill it in, preferring my version to theirs. After all who knows the content better?

Ideally, your description should be no longer than 156 characters (including spaces). However, check your description tag using a character count to confirm this. While the recommended length is only a rule of thumb, and is no longer considered a “best practice”, if you go over the 156 character limit, Google will truncate your description close to the 156 character mark and replace the missing text with ellipses …
Going over the 156 character suggestion will NOT penalize your page/site.

With all this de-emphasis on the description tag is it really worth the effort or should you just let Google fill it in for you?

Meta Descriptions in the SERPs

My recommendation is to consider whatever you put in the description tag will be the default displayed in the search results; even though it’s not always the case.

Google may choose to not use your text under some of these circumstances:

  • The information in the Meta description tag was not specific to the page it was on.
  • The search query contained phrases not in the Meta description, but Google located them in the page content. This includes words that Google considers somewhat synonymous.

Google doesn’t always use the supplied Meta description; even when the exact search phrase was contained within it. This has been observed especially if the search query is also contained within the content of the page. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine whether or not Google will show the supplied Meta Description. Which is quite frustrating for an SEO!

To wrap up this examination of the Meta Description tag and best practices; the Meta description tag gives you some control over what searchers potentially will view on the SERP and on Facebook before they click through to your site. The more compelling your description is the more click throughs you could potentially receive. If your description tags can help with your click through rate, it is definitely worth the time it takes to craft an engaging, keyword-laden Meta description tag that nicely tells searchers what the page is about.

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