What Is the Importance of Meta Descriptions in the Search Engine Optimization Process?

In this era, the internet plays a pivotal role in almost every aspect. Products and services are purchased and sold online and the marketing and promotion of these products and services are also done through this popular medium. With the help of digital marketing, the information regarding the products and services reaches the target customers. To increase the number of visitors viewing the websites, various tactics and techniques are used and all these strategies to optimize a website come under a process known as Search Engine Optimization. SEO focuses on increasing the traffic to a website, by optimizing the website to obtain a high-rank position in the organic or natural search results returned by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and so on.

For optimizing a website, various aspects are to be considered, such as the proper placement of the keywords, framing proper titles for the page contents, and much more alike. Another very important ingredient to this optimization process is the meta description. A meta description is an HTML or XHTML tag, consisting of around 160 characters, that gives the summary of a page’s content to the search engines. The meta descriptions play a crucial role in increasing the traffic to a website. A good meta description should contain the phrase or keywords that the viewers search for, to make the search engines show the meta descriptions in the search results. The SEO consultants in India and all over the world, are aware of the importance and necessity of optimizing the meta descriptions of their web pages for the optimization of their websites.

It is the meta description that attracts the viewers to click on the links to the websites and, thereby, increase the quantity of traffic to the websites. The role of a meta description primarily is, to explain the contents of the web pages very briefly but clearly so that the viewers can have an idea of what the website has to offer to them. The meta descriptions should be directly relevant to the web pages and help the viewers to know whether the web page contains what they are looking for or not.

The focused keywords should be wisely placed in the meta descriptions to make them more relevant to the web pages’ contents. Some important points should be remembered while framing meta descriptions:

• The optimum length of meta descriptions is 150-160 characters
• The meta descriptions should be unique
• It is better to use action-oriented languages in the meta descriptions
• The meta descriptions should be specific and relevant to the web pages
• A meta description should be a concise representation of a web page

Keeping all these features in mind, a meta description should be framed. Meta descriptions enhance the click-through-rate (CTR) and this helps in improving the rankings of the websites in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Thus, there remains no doubt that optimizing meta descriptions is indispensable for website optimization.