Tips for Creating a Good Meta Description

Many people pay very little attention to the meta description they can fill out for each of their pages.  If you have not been using it, then now is the time to get started.  This description is typically used whenever people search for keywords that appear on your website.  It can go a long way towards determining how many people end up clicking through to your website from the search engine results pages.

Many webmasters have not taken the time to fill out the meta description tag for their pages.  In these cases, the search engines will take snippets from the associated page and use it as the description instead.  Wouldn't you want potential visitors to read a description you wrote yourself instead of one a robot constructed?

When it comes to writing a good meta description, you want to keep things short and sweet.  Technically, you will have no choice but to do so.  Your description will be cut off after approximately the 250th character.  Everything that appears after that will be replaced by a set of ellipses.

Also, you will want to pay attention to the particular characters you use in your meta description.  Avoid using characters which will cause issues with robots.  For example, if you use quotes, then Google will immediately trim everything after it in many cases.  It is best for you to only use alpha-numeric characters for your meta description.

Keywords should appear on their associated pages and in the meta description too.  Use keywords and phrases, but make sure the overall description makes sense.  As mentioned, your description will sometimes be cutoff by the search engines, so you will want to use the keywords as soon as possible.

Creating a good meta description is similar to writing a good article resource box.  You want it to attract people to the page and deliver a high click through rate.  Include a call to action for people who spot your listing in the search engine results pages.  Do not have the same description for every page since it is important that they all be unique.

Creating your own meta descriptions is pretty easy if you are able to working with standard HTML websites.  However, you will have less control over your page's code if you use a content management system such as Wordpress.  In this case, you should use a plugin like the All-in-One SEO pack so you can create your own customized meta descriptions with ease.