Meta 4
Shawnda Mangicavallo
Meta descriptions can technically be any length, but Google generally truncates snippets to 155-160 characters. It's best to keep meta descriptions long enough that they're sufficiently descriptive, so we recommend descriptions between 50 and 160 characters. Keep in mind that the "optimal" length will vary depending on the situation, and your primary goal should be to provide value and drive clicks.
Social sharing sites like Facebook commonly use a page's meta description tag as the description that appears when the page is shared on the site. Without the meta description tag, social sharing sites may just use the first text they can find. Depending on what that first text is, this might not create a good user experience for people encountering your content via social sharing.
One way to combat duplicate meta descriptions is to implement a dynamic and programmatic way to create unique meta descriptions for automated pages. If you have the resources, though, there's no substitute for an original description written specifically for each page.
When double quotation marks ("...") are used within meta description HTML markup, Google recognizes them as signals to truncate the description from that point and will automatically cut off the rest of the text from the SERP snippet. To prevent this from happening, your best bet is to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from meta descriptions. If quotation marks are important in your meta description, you can use the HTML entity rather than double quotes to prevent truncation.
If the page targets between one and three heavily searched terms or phrases, we recommend writing your own meta description to attract users performing search queries that include those terms. If the page targets long-tail traffic (three or more keyword phrases), it may be wiser to let the search engines populate a meta description themselves. The reason is simple: When search engines pull together a meta description, they always display the keywords and surrounding phrases that the user has searched for as closely as they can. If a webmaster writes a meta description into the page's code, what they choose to write can actually detract from the relevance the engines interpret naturally, depending on the query.
meta tags are HTML tags used to provide additional information about a page to search engines and other clients. Clients process the meta tags and ignore those they don't support. meta tags are added to the section of your HTML page and generally look like this:
If you use a CMS, such as Wix, WordPress, or Blogger, you might not be able to edit your HTML directly, or you might prefer not to. Instead, your CMS might have a search engine settings page or some other mechanism to tell search engines about meta tags.
You can also specify this information in the header of your pages using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header rule. This is particularly useful if you wish to limit indexing of non-HTML files like graphics or other kinds of documents. More information about robots meta tags.
Did you get a red traffic light for the keyphrase in the meta description check in Yoast SEO? Read what this check does, and how to turn this traffic light green. Yoast SEO also checks the length of your meta description. Read about how that check works, and how to write a concise meta description.
The purpose of a meta description is simple: it needs to get someone searching with a search term on Google to click your link. In other words, meta descriptions are there to generate click-throughs from search engines.
If the search keyword matches a part of the text in the meta description, Google will be more inclined to use it and highlight it in the search results. This will make the link to your site even more inviting. Google sometimes even highlights synonyms. In the example below, both the Academy Awards and Oscars are highlighted. Getting your results emphasized like that makes them stand out even more.
Yoast SEO checks if and how often you use the words from your focus keyphrase in the meta description text. In addition, if you use Yoast SEO Premium, it also considers the synonyms you enter. If you overdo it, the plugin advises you to limit the use of your focus keyphrase.
Do you have Yoast SEO? Check the Social media preview in the Yoast SEO sidebar or social tab in the Yoast SEO meta box below your post or page. You can add a separate description for your social media channels there. In Yoast SEO Premium, you even have social previews that show you what your post or page will look like when shared on social media.
We created Meta Box in 2010 to help developers to create custom meta boxes faster and easier. Now, Meta Box is not only a library with powerful API for custom fields, but also a framework that helps you control your data the way you want.
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