The term meta description sounds complicated doesn’t it? However this isn’t the case and when they are broken down, they are easy to understand.

The more content you create and the further you dig into inbound marketing, the more you’ll discover how important meta descriptions are to the traffic and leads you expect your content to generate.

What is a meta description?

A meta description is the brief snippet of text that appears the blue link in a search engine result. The short description summaries the content of the webpage that is linked above it. Although it isn’t an office ranking factor in Google search results, it can be edited to encourage people to click through to the webpage.

It’s basically what helps the searcher decide whether or not to click the link to an article or webpage. It also helps convince or persuade readers to choose your site.

A good meta description should be around 160 characters including spaces although there isn’t a perfect length for them. It will all depend on the topic of your article or blog page with regards to what is included in your description.

Do I need a meta description?

Now you know what a meta description is, lets tackle another common question. Do you need one? The short answer is yes.

There might be 10 blue links per search engine results page, but they don’t all get clicked by an equal number of people. The higher up the result ranks, the more people who will see it and, in turn, click on it. To get your result to rank well, however, you need people to start clicking on it. Meta descriptions are your opportunity to entice people to click on your link instead of someone else’s.

You might already include keywords in a webpage’s body copy and title. But the meta description should also include keywords that help describe the content of the webpage.

Focus on one or two unique keywords in the meta description of each webpage you publish. Don’t stuff these keywords anywhere you can — make sure they fit naturally and help explain what people can expect to see if they click on your link

They live and work behind the scenes of a web page, so they need to be entered into your content management system [CMS] for every page on your website, as you can see in the above screenshot.

To summarise meta descriptions can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic. Without them, you invariably weaken your ability to drive consumers to your website.

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