Meta description is the most important thing after title (meta-title). Meta description is a small excerpt which appears in the search results (of search engines). e.g.
Meta description gives a bird eye view of the article. It should be short and easy to understand. It should have important keywords which tell the intent of the content.
e.g. if an article is about the features of MacBook Pro, then the meta description should contain all the relevant keywords that would tell the user what the content is all about.
You may use Explore Keywords Marketing Keywords Generator Tool and find all the keywords which the users search for the product. e.g. I have searched “MacBook Pro 2020” and it will provide all the searched keywords.
These keywords give a brief idea about what ideas we should out in our content to make it more relevant.
Contents
What is the Ideal Meta Description Length?
Well, you should keep the length of meta description around 160 characters. Characters include special characters, number and even spaces. The challenge for us is to tell the user about the article in such a small snippet.
If you try to overuse the keywords in the meta description or mislead the people with wrong data, it will have a bad impact on the site. Hence you should be honest while writing a meta description.
Which plugins WordPress users should use for inserting meta description?
Well, I like RankMath plugin. However you may use any of the SEO plugins which you love.
Do Meta Descriptions Matter Now?
Well, I think that small search engines like Yahoo, Baidu etc do use meta descriptions for ranking a site. However Google and Bing do not necessarily use them.
I am saying this because I have never wrote any meta description for my site englishnotes.com. Google fetches the data from the content and shows it.
Now a days, people ask very specific questions (which might be answered within the article. So, it is possible that a user might not have included that part in the meta description. What happens then? Google searches the whole content and fetches the relevant lines (which become the meta description in the SERPs. e.g. look at the screenshot below
The meta descriptions of these articles are different from what we see above. It shows that google does not depend on the meta description to understand the content. Hence you can rank in the SERPs even without writing meta description.
Title and Content Matter the Most
What remains behind then? Title (long tail) and content. The ranking of your content thus depends on the content you write. Your 80%-90% focus should be on producing good content which satisfies the query of a user.
Note that the site ranking below mine is far older than englishnotes.com and also has a great Domain and Page Authority. Its content was written in 2015 while mine was written in 2020. But the results show a different picture.
My site ranks higher because it answers the questions directly and has exact information which a user needs, unlike the second one which has more content than what the user requires. Game over!
Conclusion
So, when you write the content from now on, do remember that site’s DA/PA or age DO NOT MATTER A LOT. What matters is a content which provides the user with what they need. You should focus on problem-solving while writing the content and it will make your site grow slowly but steadily.
Time to write content with a new strategy😎
