Tag meta description Â: the best Seo Sol tips!

TweetShareShareArticle updated on 05/17/2018 (optimal meta description size), originally published on 12/16/2014

This tutorial is very complete (+ than 3300 words!), here is the summary:

Meta description: definition and HTML code

I will begin by providing a definition of the meta description tag and recall the W3C recommendations for the HTML code of this tag.

The meta description is an HTML tag located at the beginning of the page, generally shortly after the TITLE tag. Where to put it exactly? Concretely, you can place it wherever you want in the HTML header, i.e. between the and tags.

The syntax is very simple, see this meta description example (XHTML or HTML5 version):

In the name field, some put a capital letter (“Description”) but as well stay in lowercase (Google does not take case into account at this level).

On the other hand for the content of the meta, you can obviously use capital letters. You will find my advice on the right way to write your descriptions later in this article.

You can include accents but as with all the rest of your HTML code, it is imperative to have declared in which character set the page is coded (for example UTF-8). To do this, you must include a meta charset tag (and check that the file encoding matches).

It is not possible to manage formatting (for example, requiring certain words to be in bold). Moreover, it is not possible to put an HTML tag inside the content of the description.

The W3C does not define much about this meta (see here the doc for HTML5), except that it must describe the page and that there must be a single page HTML document.

Here is an excerpt from the beginning of an HTML page with a title tag and a meta description tag:

Tutorial on the meta description tag

Regarding these other tags, do not miss my other files:

Impact on natural referencing

The words present in the meta description are not taken into account for the classification, but it is nevertheless essential to write a good description for good SEO. Explanations…

No direct impact on Google positioning

It has been known for a long time: the meta description tag has no (direct) impact on SEO. In any case, that's what Google says both on its official blog and on its webmaster help pages. As early as 2007, Raj Krishnan explained on Google's official blog "while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't affect your ranking within search results", i.e.:

John Mueller repeated it again in 2007, on the official Google blog for webmasters: “the use of a description meta tag is optional and will have no effect on your rankings”, i.e.:

As if that wasn't clear enough, Matt Cutts confirmed it again in 2009: "Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking. ", either :

It's very clear and easy to verify (test) so for once we can conclude 100% that the presence of a keyword in the meta description has no direct impact on Google visibility .

Indirect impact on SEO?

So what is the use of the meta description tag, if Google indicates that it is not taken into account in its algorithm?

First, because with a good description, you encourage the Internet user to click on your result and therefore you increase the traffic generated by Google. This is exactly what Raj Krishnan quoted above indicated.

By working your metas well, you will increase the CTR (click through rate) in the SERPs. This means that even if your ranking does not improve, you will increase your traffic from Google. That's already a good thing, isn't it?

Then, even if Google specifies that the meta desc is not taken into account for the ranking, it is very likely that Google takes into account the click-through rate in the results (at least I think so). We can think of several uses of this data, including at least:

Conclusion / usefulness: the meta description is not mandatory but strongly recommended.

Do you want to go further and really improve your SEO in a sustainable way?

Read the file explaining how the meta description can improve your SEO

And at Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu?

Bing can use the meta description to generate the snippet but does not specify if it is used for positioning. Bing advises that it be “unique, relevant, grammatically correct, around 160 characters or less” (source: Bing Webmaster Guidelines).

As long as Yahoo uses Bing to generate its search engine results, so does Yahoo.

Yandex also does not specify whether this tag is used for positioning and indicates like the others that it can be used to generate the extract (source Yandex Webmaster Help).

According to SearchEngineLand, Baidu uses meta description as a ranking criterion; for the Chinese engine, you must not exceed 156 Latin characters and 78 characters in simplified Chinese.

How to measure your click-through rate in the SERPs?

Only Google can give you this information, so take advantage of it because it provides it to you! It happens in Google Search Console (GSC), section Search traffic > Research analysis. Click either on the Most frequent requests tab to have a ranking by request, or on the “Most popular pages” tab to have a ranking of your pages.

Here is an example:

Here's a video about search keywords in Search Console (video from previous version, Webmaster Tools):

It's hard to tell you what a good click-through rate is, because it depends a lot on the rest of the results page. Are there lots of Ads ads? Or a Google Maps map? Or pictures? Or a Google Shopping box? In short, there are plenty of cases where the click rate can be very different from the “standard”.

Want a tool that takes it all back for you? Contact me!

If you link your GSC account to your Google Analytics (GA) account, this data can also be viewed in GA.

A good snippet prevents the Internet user from falling back in the SERPs

If you had the chance to attend my SEO training ;-) then you know how important this notion of Backtracking rate on Google is important! You must avoid at all costs that a user who lands on your site from Google returns (in a short time) to Google, especially if he then clicks on a competing site and no longer returns on the SERPs.

This is not about the bounce rate, but about the back rate in Google (SERP Bounce Rate). Google already explained it in 2007: “[it] reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics”

To avoid this backtracking, you must of course work on the quality of your content, but this also involves that of the snippet and therefore of your meta description.

Google doesn't always display the meta description in the snippet!

You've probably noticed: even if you've taken care to write a very good description, Google doesn't use it necessarily. You probably have the impression that your meta description is not taken into account... In fact, Google has an algorithm which evaluates whether your meta description is really adapted to the request of the Internet user, or whether it is better to create the snippet from excerpts of sentences taken from the content of the page.

Is it serious? Yes if Google does not take your description while the query matches the main keyword of the page. It's pretty unlikely, but if it was, check to see if your text is that good. But don't be surprised if for secondary queries, the excerpt in the SERPs does not come from your meta desc...

Should I / can I change the meta description often?

As for the title tag, you can very well change its content if you think you can write better wording. As soon as Google crawls your page again, you will benefit. On the other hand, be careful to think of all the requests for which the description must be relevant: we do not judge the effectiveness on a single request.

Do not go so far as to constantly change your descriptions (and your title tags), it could be spotted by Google...

How to check all the meta descriptions on a site?

You have understood it, it is highly recommended to define a (unique) description on each of the pages of your site. So you should make sure everything is OK! Here are the problems that you should regularly identify and correct:

To check this, you can go to your Google Search Console account and you will have some information.

But if you want to detect other problems with your meta description, I suggest you test my professional SEO technical audit tool “RM Tech”. It knows how to spot other sub-optimizations and will list you absolutely all the URLs to correct. I designed it so I can talk about it: it's the most advanced meta description checking and testing tool I know.

Launch your audit in 3 minutes: Test it in its free version!

noodp and the description of DMOZ

When DMOZ still existed, you had to use the noodp meta robots tag. to prevent Google from using the DMOZ description instead of your meta description. The DMOZ.org directory having definitively closed, all this is no longer necessary.

How to write a good meta description?

Now that you know that this tag is strategic, it remains to be seen how! Here are the tricks I use to write an effective meta description tag.

Follow the following tips:

Incentivize the click to increase the CTR

The end goal is that the Internet user who browses the results is attracted by the extract and clicks to end up on your site. To do this, you have to use a style that appeals to him while reassuring him that he will find what he was looking for. Speak directly to him: use the formal address (or familiarity depending on your target), unlike the infinitive or substantive reserved for the title tag.

In addition to the main keywords of the page (which we inevitably find if we describe the page well, see the next paragraph), you can very well add good reasons (marketing) such as "Free delivery", “Satisfied or refunded guarantee”, etc. It is also possible to give indications such as the price, the delivery time, the name of the author, the date of publication, the name of the manufacturer, etc.

Describe precisely what is on your page

Your description must correspond as precisely as possible to the content of your page. Concretely, by reading only your title tag and your description, we must understand the main content. So that means there shouldn't be 2 pages of the site with the description. If you do not have time to write a new one for each page, it is better to put nothing rather than a generic text corresponding to your entire site.

No succession of keywords

In my experience, descriptions consisting of a long series of keywords are much less often used by Google to generate the snippet. Of course, you have to describe what's on your page, so you'll include the main words or phrases; for example for a product sheet, you must indicate the name of the product and its brand (manufacturer) if appropriate. But don't stuff your description with keywords!

more explanations: product sheet optimized for SEO

Distinguish yourself from the title tag!

If your description does not add anything more than your title tag, Google may not use it to create the snippet. So avoid repeating your title and make the effort to reformulate (you have more space, take advantage of it) or provide more detailed explanations.

Include your brand

If you want to make your brand known (which I guess!), you can very well include it in the meta description. It will be displayed in the search results, in front of the user.

Conversely, it is not always a good idea to include your brand in the title tag, because it takes up space which could be advantageously exploited by keywords.

What size for the meta description (number of characters)?

For a long time, the rule was not to exceed 160 characters. At the end of 2017, Google increased the size of the description in the results (snippet), some going up to 300 characters (it depends on the queries).

Then in May 2018, Google suddenly went back, with descriptions whose maximum size is ~155 characters.

For details, read What size to choose for the meta description tag?

Should all meta descriptions be rewritten to take into account Google's limits, each time they change? Probably not, but it depends:

Characters to avoid

In general, we do not recommend including quotes, because at some point, it may not work well. It is indeed possible that Google truncates your description – and if it does not happen to Google, it will happen with other tools or engines. The apostrophe should not be a problem (unless you use the apostrophe to enclose the content of your tag, in which case you must use the backslash escape character \').

As for punctuation, be careful not to overload your description with signs that would make it difficult to read. For example, do not combine parentheses, commas, semicolons, colons, brackets, and braces in the same description.

Meta description for the main CMS

Here is how to add a meta description in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Prestashop and Blogger…

Meta description in WordPress

Basically, WordPress did not provide a field for the meta description of an article or a page, it's a shame. The bravest will test a method without plugin, a priori more effective for the speed of the site, but requiring development. You have to go through custom fields, then resume in the template.

The other solution is to install a plugin. No need to choose one that only manages the meta description, you might as well take a WordPress SEO optimization plugin, it will be useful for other things (title tag, noindex, pagination, breadcrumb trail, sitemaps, etc. ). The best known is Yoast SEO, which adds the following fields below your post:

Other possible WordPress plugins include All in One SEO Pack.

If you have installed this type of plugin, you no longer have an excuse not to write a superb description for each page of your site! In any case, it's always better to write it manually than to settle for automated meta descriptions (which this plugin offers).

Meta description in Drupal

The easiest way is to install a meta description management module on Drupal, for example Nodewords. By default, it will take the first 255 characters of the page but of course you can define the description page by page. To do this, go to Admin > Content Management > Meta tags.

You can also test the Metatags module, probably better known, which can manage all meta tags (and even the canonical URL, open graph tags, Twitter Cards, publisher, robots and others). 'others).

Meta description in Joomla

Joomla offers to define a description for the whole site; if ever you do not fill in a description for a given page, the general description may be used. My advice: never do that! Maybe that's why we often see messages "How to remove duplicate meta description tags on Joomla?" »…

Fortunately, it is also possible to define the meta description for each page, category or menu item.

There are Joomla extensions that automate descriptions, but this is still less effective than manually writing text for each article or category.

Meta description in Prestashop

The meta description tag in Prestashop is really very simple since you can fill it in the form adapted to each page (home page, category or product sheet) . Just indicate it in the meta description field below:

Meta description in Blogger

In Blogger, by default you don't have the possibility to define a meta description, but you just have to configure your blog well. In settings go to Settings > Search preferences. The 1st element concerns the meta tags and in particular the description, which you must activate by checking the "yes" box to the question "Activate meta description tags for search?" ". You can then enter a description for your site, but it is mainly page by page that it is useful.

Then, whenever you edit an item, you can enter the description in the right margin in "Item Settings > Description for search: