Optimise Meta Description - how to
The Meta Description on your page is not a direct ranking factor. It used to be, back in the day when Google felt as though it could extend some trust to webmasters, but much like the keyword tag it has declined in important over the years - you now derive no SEO benefit from optimising a Meta Description. Does this mean you shouldn’t pay any attention to your Description? No, of course not!
You can find your Meta Description in the head section of an HTML document. It will be incorporated within a Meta tag. To add a Meta Description, just insert some text within this tag. Once the page is indexed in a major search engine, and providing your have optimised the description correctly, you will see it display beneath your result in the SERPs.
Your Description is essentially a sales pitch. You can see your Description in the SERPs underneath one of your listings. This is the first point of contact you will have with a prospective visitor and, much like with your Page Title, it’s important to make a good first impression. There has been a great deal of research on this topic and all the evidence suggests that a listing in position number five in Google with a strong Meta Description will receive a great level of click-through rate than a website in position number four with either no Meta Description or one that is poorly optimised.
So what do you need to do to make a good impression? Include a call to action. A call to action like “get”, “buy” or “find” will entice the user to visit your website. Sell your page and make sure the user reading your listing knows what the page is about and exactly what they can achieve from clicking-through. Make sure the description is no more than 200 characters, including whitespace, long, this will prevent any possibility of text being cut from your description when it is displayed in the SERPs.