Meta description

What is a Meta Description?

The meta description defines the description of a page in just one or two sentences, and is shown in search engine result pages. The meta description plays a big role within search engine marketing and deserves your attention.

The meta description is part of the meta tags family, HTML elements that are defined in a page's <head> section to help instruct browsers and search engines on how to behave on your page as well as how to display your content in the search engine results page.

What properties does a Meta Description have?

Length

Use these rules of thumb when it comes to the meta description length:

Maximum length: 155 characters or 920 pixels
Minimum length: 70 characters or 430 pixels

In most cases the lengths above work well for most devices for Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. These lengths are however no guarantee that search engines display your meta description. In the end, that's up to the search engines.

Synonyms for Meta Description

Because of its relevance to SEO, the meta description is sometimes also called "seo description". For the sake of ease when we refer to the meta description element we'll call it meta description.

How do you write optimal Meta Descriptions?

Writing great meta descriptions isn't easy, that's why below we describe what makes a meta description great:

Great readability - getting the point across even though there is so little space.
Relevant keywords - use the most relevant keywords for each page.
Delivering the message - a meta description should convey benefits or USPs.
Good length - a meta description should be between 70 - 155 characters (430 -920 pixels).
Uniqueness - every meta description should be unique.