What is Meta Description?
A meta description is a tag used to describe the content of a web page. This description will show up below the title and URL of your page as it appears in the search engine results. And since meta descriptions appear with your title and URL on the search results of pages, they have the power to help the result of showing your articles to maximum audience.
When some content appears on a web page, users see if it answers their query through title or description. A quality description can positively impact the number of people who click through the site. According to Neil Patel, pages with meta descriptions see an average of 5.8% more clicks than pages without. A quality meta description on the page can raise traffic and, engagement, improving the ranking on the web.
It is a helpful tool both for users and the search engine when it comes to SEO management. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique of getting pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google. It is very crucial to follow SEO techniques as 'Search' is one of the primary ways that we discover content on the internet. In recent years, search engines have emphasized more on meta descriptions with a fitting SEO.
Now if you are thinking about the length of the meta description, it is crucial to notify you that staying within the meta description length will help to attract readers' attention better. It is important to stay within the character limit on the meta description length to avoid having part of your description, get cut off by the search engines, and appear incomplete on the webpage. According to Semrush, SEO specialists recommend using the 150–160 character range. You can try to use fewer characters than 150, but strictly avoid going over the 60-character limit, as search engines will cut it off.
Including the major keywords in the meta description is one of the most useful and easiest ways to convince the users and search engines that your page is relevant.
Writing a unique description and avoiding copies is another helpful way for creating great content. In fact, Matt Cutts from Google has said that 'It's better to leave them blank than to have duplicates'. Because copied or duplicate meta descriptions are not optimized for most pages.
Any special characters like", #, $, %, -, +, [,], \, /; etc. should not be used in meta description.