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Meta description

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Part 2 of our 7 on-page SEO Training course.

Why do you write a meta description and title?

Metas are the advertising for your page, when you search for a word or phrase in Google it shows up. To goal of a meta title and meta description is to get a high click-through rate (CTR). Basically, you want to make sure searchers choose your website over others.

An example of a meta title and description:

Example of a great meta description from Google

Are there any technical rules I have to remember?

The meta title should ALWAYS start with this exact keyword.
The meta description should always contain the exact keyword once (it is enough).
Meta title / desc. should be timeless
The meta title / desc. should always be unique for every page
Needs unique selling points (USPs) of the company you are writing for
Don’t use quotation marks, Google will ‘cut them off’

Don’t forget the maximum length of a meta titles and descriptions. A meta title should be 512 pixels wide (i.e. a -w- is “wider” than a ‘i”). Since writing programs like Microsoft Office Word don’t count pixels, the correct lengths are:

Meta title: minimum 40, maximum 55 characters
Meta description: minimum 110, maximum 145 characters

While meta descriptions don’t have an exact pixel based width anymore in Google, we advise to stick to 145 characters. Research over more than 10,000 meta descriptions has shown that the most common cut-off length is between 140-160 characters.

Examples of what is not ‘timeless’:

“Buy the new xx car because it is cold outside,” doesn’t work very well when it’s 40 degrees outside.

“Two months ago we introduced our new xx product, read all about it,” should be “In july 2014 we introduced our…”

An example of a meta description that is too long:

An example of a meta description that is too long.

How to write a meta description

Some meta title best practices are:

Always write them last; it’s way faster and will give you better meta’s.
Use a site like Character count to make sure your meta title and meta description have the correct length.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone typing the keyword of your page in Google’s search engine, what is it that they actually want and that you offer; answer this and they will click.

Resources

If you want to know more about metas, we suggest you visit these pages:

The next step

Use your language assets and sign up as a freelance writer at Copypanthers, you will learn everything about writing a great SEO text.

Of course you can also order metas for your own e-commerce site, using our crowd of hundreds of freelancers in 22 languages will never disappoint. Order your metas via our quote form.

Continue with part 3, headers, of our SEO training or start from the beginning with keywords.