What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are simply text in HTML code that contains information about a website. Meta Tags consist of two parts Meta Title and Meta Description.
Whenever any user searches for a query on a search engine, the search engine shows different Titles and Descriptions in SERPs. That data is known as meta tags.
These Meta tags are used to help search engines rank the pages.
Meta Title: The Meta title is referred to the title of an HTML document that is shown in search engine results as well as a page’s tab in the browser. The recommended length for a meta title is 60-65 characters.
Meta Description: A Meta description is a short paragraph describing and summarizing the content on your web page. The recommended length for meta description is 155–160 characters.
How to write better meta descriptions?
As the name indicates Meta descriptions are written to give an idea to the user/visitor of what to expect from a web page in simple words it describes the webpage. They play an important role in the search engine optimization efforts of any website. Apart from content, you need a perfect title, description, and keywords to rank high in any search engine.
Here is a checklist for how to write a Meta description that will help your website to rank better in SERPs.
Keywords – The important part is keywords, your meta tags should contain keywords from your content. The keywords appear in bold whenever we search for them.
Relevance – The Meta description should match with the content written on your web page. Try to make it as relevant as possible. If you use different Meta Tags i.e. they don’t match to your content on the webpage then it will look spammy resulting in increased bounce rate of the website and harming the rankings.
Legible – Meta description should be readable by the users/visitors i.e. should be as a human-written sentence. The user should not feel the risk of reaching a spam website by reading your Meta description.
Length – Write Meta descriptions within the limits prescribed by Google. If the Meta description extends the determined length, the search engine shall cut off the exceeded words. So make sure to add the important keywords at the beginning of your meta description.
Duplicacy – Avoid duplicate descriptions. Your website may be penalized by Google if you use duplicate meta descriptions, which will definitely affect your ranking.
Appealable – you can make your Meta description eye-catching by adding several elements to your snippets. These elements include star and customer ratings, product information, calorie count, etc.
Why is it necessary to avoid duplicity in Meta descriptions?
If any site has more than two similar Meta descriptions, then they are considered duplicate Meta descriptions. It is a result of human error or script error. Duplicate Meta descriptions make it difficult for the users to differentiate between similar pages displayed through the search result. This can result in rewriting the same description by the search engine for the user. However, it has no impact on SEO, but it has an impact on CTR from search results. Whenever you feel that writing a unique Meta description does not make any difference, you should leave the Meta description blank.