When the users find your page on the search engines page results, they look into the meta description, to understand what the page is about and whether to click on it. The meta description gives a brief description of the page. So the readers can decide whether they want to click on it or not.
Of course, the meta description must be compelling and needs to match the user intent. By writing an appealing meta text you can immediately gain the attention of the users and drive more traffic to your website.
In this post, I am going to discuss meta description in detail and its impact on SEO, how to add and check it, and more. So, let’s start with the discussion.
How to Check or Detect Meta Description?
You can easily check the meta description for any website or web page using Definite SEO. It is a great SEO tool that allows you to run an in-depth analysis of your website including on-page SEO factors like meta description, and many others. You can use the tool to check the meta description and run a complete analysis of the website.
- All you need to do is input the website URL in the given space, for which you want to check the meta description, And then click on the ‘Analyze’ button.
- Now the tool will run a complete SEO check of the web page or site you have entered. To check the meta description, you need to click on the ‘On-Page SEO’ and then click on the ‘Content Factor’. Here you can check the meta description in the test results.
- If the test result shows a green bullet, then the added meta description is correct. However, if it shows the red bullet, then you need to optimize the meta description. Try adding the focus keyword, and stay within the optimal limit. The tool will suggest to you how you can improve the meta text.
How to Add Meta Description to Web Pages and Posts?
Adding Meta Description to a Web Page is very easy if you know what you are doing. For WordPress website you need to install an SEO Plugins for it.
Adding Meta Description to a web page Step1:
Download and install Definite SEO on your Website, and open a post/page or product for editing as suggested in following screenshot.
Add Meta Description to web page Step2:
Now while you have opened a post/page or a category for editing you will see Definite SEO options on your right side. Just click “Search Engine Appearance” and a popup will appear and you can add the desired meta description there. See following screenshot for more details.
What is a Meta Description?
A meta description is a brief or a short snippet of text about a webpage that you provide to the users when they see the page in search results. The meta description is an HTML element which provides essential information about the page. Although meta description is not the only ranking factor, it is one of the main on-page SEO factors.
As far as meta description length is concerned you should keep it between 155-160 characters. So, a good meta description should provide the necessary information to the users to easily decide whether to click the page or not. You may also read about importance of internal links in SEO, add breadcrumbs in WordPress and SEO benefits of keyword in url.
If you do not add the meta text manually, the search engines will randomly pick any relevant text from the web page.
That is why it is important to optimize the meta description. Also make sure to check and add meta description for all of the web pages of your site, just to make sure everything is correct.