Last Updated on January 3, 2021 by Santhosh Muralidhar

Writing a great meta description can help a lot in getting more clicks and traffic from SEO.

A relevant and perfect meta description tag can grab the attention of users and persuade them to click on your website.

The meta description is also said to be one of the very important ranking factors.

In some ways, these meta descriptions can be correlated with real-world things like the cover page of a book or a movie poster/trailer. 

Because the intention behind creating a great movie poster is to give a good insight into the movie and thereby attract more audiences to watch the film in the theatre.

Likewise, an attractive cover page of the book can grab the eyeballs of many interested readers to go through the book.

This is what we intend to do by writing a perfect meta description. Get more people to interact with your site and content through SEO.

Let me now share some good tips to write the best meta description which will help you to fully leverage the potential of meta descriptions.

1. Be precise and specific with meta descriptions

The idea here is to create meta descriptions that exactly convey what the service or content piece offers to your audience.

As a good SEO practice, you must write meta descriptions that are at least 150-200 characters in length.

It is no wonder that short and precise meta descriptions tend to give the best results for SEO.

Suppose assume you are selling tennis balls and rubber balls on your website. In this case, it will be great if you can create two different web pages for tennis and rubber balls.

And subsequently, write two specific meta descriptions for both tennis balls and rubber ball pages. This will attract people to go through all your ball collections.

This tactic will be much better than just putting all the balls collections on one page and write a broad meta description about buying balls.

Nobody expects to read vague and too lengthy meta descriptions. 

Note that lengthy descriptions can sometimes get cut short by google and be shown partially on the search results. These types of things aren’t a great sign for your SEO.

2. Use Keywords and Related Terms In an Appropriate Way.

Keywords can hugely impact both your meta descriptions and rankings.

As a good SEO practice, It is advisable to add your main target keyword into the meta description.

And it will be much better if the keyword appears at the beginning of the meta descriptions.

Usually, the first few terms of your meta description will have the highest weightage and visibility.

So, it is better to include relevant keywords and terms in the beginning.

But you should ensure that the keywords are added only in a natural manner. 

You should not artificially induce a keyword into the description and spam with your keywords.

The best practice is to add the main keyword only once in your meta descriptions. 

You are free to add other related words, synonyms, and phrases in your meta description. These things will improve the relevancy of meta descriptions.

For example, If my article is about how to start a blog then I can think of including terms like WordPress themes, blogging guide, web hosting in my meta descriptions. This will help to make the meta description appear more accurate.

You can always make use of the best SEO keyword research tools (Ubersuggest, SEMrush, Google Trends, Keyword Planner) to find and add the related words, keywords, terms, and synonyms for your meta description.

Also, Naturally including key relevant terms in your content and description tag will increase the chances of getting rich snippets.

3. Make your Meta Description Look Actionable and Relevant

The ultimate intention behind writing the perfect meta description is to achieve a high click-through rate for the web page on search results. 

And if the meta description is actionable and then surely many users would click and engage with the web page.

You can add suitable Call to action (CTA) words to make the meta description look actionable.

You should also add the unique value proposition in the description. 

Basically, you can use meta descriptions to briefly describe what the audience can anticipate getting by interacting with your website.

If you are selling any product or providing service you can think of adding the highlighted product features into the meta description tag.

Also, you can try adding power words and emotional words for the description. This would improve the click-through rate of your website.

For example, if you own a travel booking website then maybe you can create a perfect meta description like “Explore the exotic locations in Europe and enjoy pleasant trips. Book your ticket now.”

I’m also attaching the screenshots that show one of the meta descriptions used by a popular travel booking site known as Yatra.

This should give you a good idea of writing a perfect meta description.

I hope you got some good information about writing meta descriptions by reading this post.

Thanks.