Meta Descriptions: What They Are and Why They Are Important

For a small business owner or a novice entrepreneur looking to promote their site, the phrase meta descriptions sounds a bit technical. If you are a working mother who wants to earn money online, a student wanting to turn your passion to profit, or a retiree who wants to explore your talents on entrepreneurship, encountering such a phrase may easily put you on a snuggle.

The good news: it doesn’t have to!

Meta descriptions simply refer to the snippet of information you can find under a search result link.

This helpful bit of information gives people a glimpse of the article. The bold words on a meta description show which terms matched the user’s typed-in keywords. Now that you know what a meta description is, it is time to understand why it is important.

Here are the top 3 reasons meta descriptions play a major role in your business site:

1. Meta Descriptions drive organic traffic.

When you search for something online, you tap in a few key words and quickly go through the first few results that pulled up. Users do not normally read every word on a search results page. This means that the words that jump out at you are the ones that match the terms you typed in, the bolded phrases on the results, and the short description below each link in the results list. The more relevant your description is, the more words are balded and the stronger you attract a user’s attention to click on your website’s link.

Although meta descriptions have not shown any direct impact on a website’s ranking on search pages, it certainly has a huge role in influencing internet users to click through a site.

2. Meta Descriptions are social media influencers.

As it turns out, the impact of meta information is not just exclusive to search engines. Social sites such as Facebook display the description tag of a web page when shared on the network. If the page does not have one, Facebook automatically uses the first few lines of the content as a description text.

Although this sounds logical on paper, the reaction it can stir up among the audience may not always be what the site owner is rooting for. If you want to stay on the safe side and avoid receiving backlash from social media users, make sure you have a meta description that won’t get you misinterpreted.

3. Meta Descriptions sell your website to people.

When your website graces Google’s results page, you are competing with 9 other websites. A user browses through these websites quickly and decides in a matter of seconds which one to click.

The meta description is the make-or-break factor that will spell the difference for you. It is a sales pitch comprising of a few lines to market your website and move people to click on your link out of all the others.

Will your meta description tip the scale on your favor? 

Here are a few tricks to make sure that it does:

• Stick to a 160-character limit. Long-winding descriptions get cut off and you may not get a chance to put your message across. 
• Make sure that your description consists of complete sentences. Stuffing your description with a string of keywords that don’t make sense will not attract visitors. There’s also a good chance you will be flagged by Google.
• Repeat your key phrase. Google will highlight phrases that match the query and the more bolded words you have in your description, the stronger will you attract users.
• Adding a phone number is a sure way to reel-in traffic. This will help repeat visitors and users who want to get contact details promptly.
• Hire a content writer VA to take care of your meta description and web content. Professional web writers from know how to strategically put together content to attract organic traffic.

Now that you know what a meta description is and why it is important, how well can you say yours perform on search pages?