MOZ guide to ideal meta description
Most SEO’s know what meta description is. Meta description is a character snippet that summarizes a page’s content. Search engines show the meta description in search results when the searched for phrase is contained in the description.
The length of meta description is 160 characters.
To help marketers win at search engine marketing in the coming year, MOZ columnist Dr. Peter J. Meyers has shared an article with tips and tricks on how to handle meta description in 2018.
On the questions ‘do metas even matter?’, Meyers says, “Before we reveal the new limit, here’s an uncomfortable question — when it seems like Google is rewriting so many snippets, is it worth having meta description tags at all? Across the data set, we were able to successfully capture 70,059 original Meta Description tags (in many of the remaining cases, the sites simply didn’t define one). Of those, just over one-third (35.9%) were used as-is for display snippets.
Keep in mind, though, that Google truncates some of these and appends extra data to some. In 15.4% of cases, Google used the original meta description tag, but added some text. This number may seem high, but most of these cases were simply Google adding a period to the end of the snippet. Apparently, Google is a stickler for complete sentences. So, now we’re up to 51.3% of cases where either the display snippet perfectly matched the meta description tag or fully contained it.
What about cases where the display snippet used a truncated version of the meta description tag? Just 3.2% of snippets matched this scenario. Putting it all together, we’re up to almost 55% of cases where Google is using all or part of the original meta description tag. This number is probably low, as we’re not counting cases where Google used part of the original meta description but modified it in some way”.
Comments are closed.
