In today’s episode of Quick Blogging Tips we’ll talk about how to use meta descriptions effectively. Meta descriptions can help increase your pageviews and drive sales to your products.
What is a meta description?
Meta descriptions are the small snippet of text that appears under a post’s title in google search results. These can be entered in manually using the Yoast SEO plugin if you are on wordpress or using SEO features that many other platforms provide if you are not using WordPress for your website.
Should You Make a Meta Description for your post?
Yes. This is an essential part of everything that you publish on the internet.
Some people will say that if you leave this section blank, that gives Google the opportunity to “fill in the blanks” with optimized content from your post, but this is not the case.
Google will put something in place for you if you do not create your own meta description BUT it might not be the best content. Google bot will pull something from your post and it could be anything from the first sentence of your post, to any random sentence that includes your keyword.
The problem with letting google pull it’s own description is that the sentence pulled might not make sense outside of the context it was written in. The sentence also may not be a good reflection of what your post has to offer.
The Best Way to Use Meta Descriptions
It is best SEO practice to create your own, highly optimized descriptions and fill them in, for every post that you put out on the internet.
However, if Google thinks it has a better description for a particular user, Google will still overwrite your description with what they think should be served up for a specific user. So writing your own meta descriptions gives you the best of both opportunities. You will have the chance to give a solid description that can covert into clicks AND you can rest assured that if there is a good reason to replace that description, Google will do so with other content from your post.
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