Meta description how many words

It starts with the page! On-page SEO requires you to add relevant keywords into your content in a way that makes sense and is informative to your readers. Just putting in random keywords will make no sense and can actually penalize you overall. You might often see many articles that say the ultimate guide or the end-all guide or the best guide for SEO. Meta descriptions are more than just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO content.

We have personally seen rankings increase using these tactics for an optimized meta description. The biggest SEO mistakes for small businesses come when they keep their web pages too simple and have almost no content on a page. You can do this by answering questions that people post online about businesses like yours.

The good place to find these questions that people might be asking about your business is a site like Quora or Reddit. On mobile devices, the max limit is about pixels and characters. Google shows up to pixels on a desktop. You can check it with SERP preview tool. Do you want to know more? Read our complex guide about meta description. What is a meta description? A meta description is the small blurb that appears underneath your website on the SERP that includes information about your page.

It is designed to provide users with a brief summary of the content on your page so that users know if the page will answer their question. Traditionally, meta description length has maxed out at characters, with the exception of experimental periods such as when Google temporarily extended the length to a character meta description length. It is important to stay within the character limit on the meta description length to avoid having part of your description get cut off by the search engine and appear incomplete in the SERP.

Staying within the meta description length will help to attract consumers attention better. The meta description is a valuable tool both for users and the search engine when it comes to SEO management. When the page appears on the SERP , users will scan it to see if it answers their query. A quality description can positively impact the number of people who click through your site. In turn, this can raise your traffic and engagement, improving your rankings in the SERP.

Here is a five-step breakdown, based on recommendations and suggestions Google has stated in its webmaster guidelines, of how to write effective descriptions that will help grow your CTR from your listings on the SERPs and become an expert at SEO.

Bing,Yahoo and DuckDuckGo don't have different rules per device regarding the maximum length of the meta description. Bing opens in a new tab advises to use a maximum meta description length of characters.

Our own research has shown that meta descriptions with or more characters are often cut-off in Bing, so we advise to keep it to a maximum of characters when you're optimizing for Bing specifically. Yahoo does not give much advice in their Help section opens in a new tab about the minimum and maximum length of the meta description. Since the meta description consists of two lines, this roughly translates to characters. However, we haven't seen this full width being used, nor have we seen meta descriptions with this many characters being displayed.

In practice a significant amount of meta descriptions tags above characters are truncated so we advise you to stick to a maximum amount of characters. Although DuckDuckGo is not very informative about their advice on how to optimize pages for their search engine, our research has shown that when you stick to a maximum of characters you should be safe. Our advice regarding the minimum amount of characters for DuckDuckGo is: 70 characters. In order for search engines and users to be able to distinguish between pages, it's vital that each indexable page has a unique meta description.

Both search engines and users may think that pages are duplicates of one another if they contain the same meta description.

For search engines, having duplicate meta descriptions is a signal that these pages may be duplicate pages and should therefore not be included in the search results. The meta description is essentially your sales pitch. You need it to be great. The meta descriptions plays a major role in a visitor decision to choose which result to click on. Even though there is no direct relation between great meta descriptions and higher rankings, meta descriptions play a vital part in Search Engine Optimization:.

When it comes to meta descriptions the interests of search engines and users are very much aligned. If the written meta descriptions works well for users , the benefits from a search engine optimization point of view follow naturally.

Meta descriptions heavily influence click-through-rates CTRs - the percentage of people clicking on your listing of a listing. The meta description is essentially your sales pitch, comparable with advertisement descriptions in Google AdWords.

When the meta description is missing, too long or too short, search engines may produce a description of their own. Often this is sub-optimal, as you want it to look as well as possible to entice people to visit your website. In order to drive traffic from social media it's vital to use social media markup such as for instance Facebook's Open Graph and Twitter's Twitter Cards.

This markup is used to retrieve information such as the title, description and images which should be shown on social media. Carefully choosing what social media platforms show when your page is shared leads to more visitors. If social media markup is missing, the meta description is often used as the fall-back. So if you're unable to use social media markup, having a great meta description helps drive traffic from social media.

Search engines are trying to index the entire web, including PDF files. When search engines show your PDF files in search engine result pages you want them to show an enticing meta description. A better meta description than this:. Please note that there's no easy way to define the meta description on Mac OS. There are third party tools out there which do the trick. In the end, that's up to the search engines to decide, but you can influence this by applying the best practices around writing meta descriptions.

There's a reason why you see them rarely: search engines don't like them. Even excessively using regular special characters such as dashes - , pipes or commas , can trigger your manually defined meta descriptions not to be shown. That depends. In the perfect world, each and every page within your website has a manually crafted meta description.

For a website with a hundred pages this isn't an issue, but for e-commerce websites with thousands of pages this is a full-time job, and the return on this huge investment over using generated meta descriptions is very uncertain. Define manual meta descriptions where you can really make them count.

Determine which pages are most important to you, and define manual meta descriptions for these. Criteria which help here are: potential revenue, potential organic traffic, the degree in which these pages are vital to your website homepage, product category page, hubpages etc.

Meta descriptions are often generated for product pages and blog archive pages category, author, tags, date and so on. Make sure to write a good template which adheres to the general guidelines.