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Google’s Advice on Creating Effective Meta Descriptions

Google has put out an updated documentation on meta description to help webmasters distinguish best practices and worst practices.

Meta description on a web page is generally shown as the snippet in the search results as seen in the image below.

These snippets give the user an idea about what she must expect once the search result is clicked, and the page is shown.

If Google doesn’t find an apt meta description on a web page, it will take a snippet from the content to show.

The snippets are taken randomly from the content with the searched keywords in it.

With the new documentation on the meta descriptions, Google is helping webmaster with information on good and bad practices.

Good examples of meta descriptions

Summarize the business and not the page content – The first example given by Google is about a website of a brick-and-mortar business that has given the business details on the meta description and not a summary of the page content. It has information about the type of business, hours of opening, location and details of products. This is a good practice as users may want to know about a business before purchasing anything.

Snippet from web page content – Taking a snippet from the page content is a good practice and users would be able to know what the web page is about. There are CMS systems that allows the content creator to pick important sentences from the page content and put them as meta descriptions. It is a practice worth following.

Summarize page content – The best practice in creating a helpful meta description would be to summarize the content of a page. It will give the users an idea about what to expect from the page they are about the view.

Specific information about the product or service – Adding specific and detailed information about the product or service in your meta description is a good practice to follow. You can add the USP of your product or service in the meta description, which could be helpful to the users as well as your business.

Google has also explained about the bad practices in creating meta descriptions.

Bad examples of meta descriptions

Same description for all pages – Using the same templated meta description for all web pages is certainly a bad practice. It doesn’t help the user in understanding what a particular page is all about.

Short description – Creating meta descriptions that are too small is a bad example as it doesn’t summarize what a page is about. That doesn’t add any value to the users and hence it is no advisable to create short meta descriptions.

Keywords list in meta descriptions – Search snippets are used by search engines to give users some idea about the page before they click on them. Adding list of keywords on meta description doesn’t add any value to the user. Therefore, adding a list of keywords on the meta description is a bad practice.

Description doesn’t summarize the page – As mentioned in the above points, meta descriptions are meant to give the users an idea about the content of the page. Any meta description that doesn’t summarize the content of the page is unhelpful to the user.

You can find a detailed report here on Google’s recommendation for meta descriptions.

If you want to know more about creating good meta descriptions, or want me to help you in SEO, contact me now.