What Are the Meta Description Factors You Must Follow

What is meta description? & What are the 6 meta description factors you must follow while writing meta description?
Meta descriptions are short descriptions of a web page which summarise the content of the page in limited characters. They work in sync with the page title & together determine if your content, out of the many on a single page, attracts the visitors to click. Though Google had announced back in 2009 that, meta descriptions wont be an effective ranking factor but still it is important as Meta title & Meta description both are important conversion factors. So it is important for you to create influencing title & description, while refraining from keyword stuffing. Here are 6 meta decription factors you must keep in mind

Know the Optimal Length

While crafting a meta description, it is important for you to know the permissible character limit, without which it is going to negatively impact your SEO efforts. On desktop devices the maximum meta description length is 155 to 160 characters. For mobile search results, the maximum character limit is 130 characters. The one thing you must keep in mind however is, the optimal length will sometimes vary depending on the situation or character itself, and your primary goal should be to write for visitors & not for search engine.

Unique Meta Description

The meta description must be unique for every content & every web page. Make sure you are not copying your competitors meta description. Each page of your website should have a unique meta description that accurately describes the page’s content. Writing meta descriptions is an art & you must create them patience & with some creativity so as to make it appealing to the readers. If you do not include a meta description then Google will fetch some part of your content as description which could reduce your website's CTR.

Unique Target Keywords

Define keywords for which you want to rank & create a meta description around the selected target keyword. A unique target keyword helps in boosting your ranking by showing your website on top results whenever a user searches for a query which has your target keyword. After that, it is your meta title & meta description that do the job of attracting clicks to your content. So make sure you use unique target keywords.

Write for Humans, Not Robots

This is an important point. You need to keep in mind that it is ultimately the user who is going to read & click the content, which in the end boosts your SEO results. Don't go after stuffing keywords in your meta tags, instead write creative adverts that catches eyes of the website visitors. google anyways will reward your website with higher rank if it gets good amount of clicks.

Description Should Match Page Content

Refrain from adopting Black-Hat SEO tactics by stuffing keyword in your meta tags. Google will find out if your meta descriptions does not match the content of your page. Google might even penalize you if you do it. Most importantly, misleading descriptions will probably increase your bounce rate which is enough of a reason to avoid content & meta tag mismatch.

Double Quotation Marks

Do not use "double quotation marks" in HTML of a meta description, as it will be detrimental for your SEO. Google cuts off the meta description that has quotation mark when it appears on a SERP. It is advised that you remove all non-alphanumeric characters from meta descriptions. However if double quotes are important for you meta description, you must use the HTML entity rather than double quotes to prevent it from getting deleted.