Optimize Meta Description of the pages of your website

A Meta description can be said to be a summary – of up to 160 characters – of the contents of a website page. It is a tag in HTML and if optimized correctly, can be an excellent tool for on-page SEO.

Meta descriptions serve the primary purpose of encouraging and getting people seeking information on Google or any other search engine to click your website’s link and visit the page described in the Meta description.

Your Meta description is what Google shows to its users to enable them to have an idea of what your page is about. So the better written and compelling (optimization) your Meta description is, the higher the chances of the user clicking on the link.

Meta descriptions should be written in such a way that your potential visitors click on your search result instead of the competitor's search result.

A well-optimized Meta description would have the following characteristics:

• Up to 160 characters.
• It is composed of an active voice.
• Must include a call to action
• Must include the relevant keywords
• Talk about the core parts of the page
• Must be unique

Some examples or ideas for writing a meta description are the following:

• Use "Top x ...". A typical example is "Top 10 Laptops priced less than $600."
• You can use some word in uppercase to be more appealing, but don't abuse of the uppercase or Google will ignore you ;).
• Use emojis: that will transform your meta description into something very eye-catching. Unfortunately, Google does not always show them, but why not to test? :). Again don't abuse them.

If you have run out of ideas about what to write in the meta description, here's a tip to help you to write the meta description of an article. As you probably already know, it's important that in the content of each page you use different headings (h1,h2,h3 ...) tags.

Usually, these headings tags are the main thematic points of your articles, so a good idea is to rely on them to write your meta description.

Why Is It Important?

As far as ranking-based SEO is concerned, the Meta description has no effect or importance whatsoever on it.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Meta description is useless for the betterment of your website.

A meta description is what helps you cajole Google users into clicking on your link.

With an optimized Meta description, more people will click on your links, and to Google, this means your web page contains relevant and vital information their users need.

An optimized Meta description will increase your CTR (Click Through Rate) and as such, they would move you up the ranking chart and would suggest your web page more to their users.

This is why it is very important to optimize your Meta description, to give it that aura that users can’t resist.

Top 5 SEO Tools to optimize the meta description of your pages:

• Answer the Public (Paid): fetch automatically completed queries in enormous quantities and divide them into lists. This can help you to uncover questions being asked by Google users.
• SEO Web Page Analyzer (Paid): here is a way to have comprehensive analysis for web pages as you can get to see images which do not have alt tags, internal links, meta description, external links, etc. Get on-page SEO scores too
• Google Search Console (Free): There’s a lot to gain from Google Search Console as this plugin is free and highly effective, providing you with highly valuable data which will give you ways to improve your rankings and show you the performance of your site.
• SERPsim (Free): very reliable snippet optimizer which has high precision. Has been built with the latest updates from Google when it comes to the limits for the title as well as meta description based on pixels.
• Site Condor (Paid): a comprehensive tool for website auditing which identifies potential SEO problems such as broken links or extremely long title tags. Problems can be fixed through suggestions which are made available via its View Recommendations feature.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to increase CTR through your meta descriptions

• Meta Description (Free): use this plug-in to assign HTML meta description to your posts as well as your pages.
• W3 Total Cache (Free): enhances SEO as well as user experience for websites through the optimization of website performance and load speed using inbuilt features such as CDN integration, meta title optimization, meta description optimization, etc.
• Jetpack (Free+Paid): Jetpack remains the best plug-in to keep your site secure while repelling brute-force attacks as well as unauthorized logins. You can get free basic protection with expanded backup as well as automatic fixes as soon as you upgrade.
• WordPress SEO by Yoast (Free+Paid): very popular WordPress plugin which takes care of search engine optimization needs. Everything is covered from meta description to meta keywords and more.
• All in One SEO Pack (Free+Paid): very similar to Yoast and can give you the best back-end SEO tools as well as services collection for very effective keywords

Did you know? A Meta description is one of the elements that ought to be placed as tags in the section of an HTML file. Writing a good Meta description will help to increase the chances users clicks in your result in searches.

Expert’s suggestion: “Search engines show the Meta description in search results mostly when the searched for phrase is within the description, so optimizing the Meta description is crucial for on-page SEO.” – Michiel Heijmans (https://yoast.com/meta-descriptions/ )