Meta Descriptions can be used by search engines as the descriptive snippet in their search results. However, they can still be important in driving more clicks to a website in a couple of ways. So keywords used in a meta description are not used to rank the page. Meta Descriptions are not used as a direct ranking signal by Google for their search results (even Google say so). You are able to crawl the website, and look at the ‘ Meta Description‘ tab, which displays all pages, their meta descriptions, respective lengths and helps you identify common issues. Meta descriptions can also be viewed and analysed in bulk in an SEO crawler, such as our own SEO Spider software. They can often be viewed within CMS, such as WordPress which has various plugins such as Yoast SEO, which allows you to view and set meta descriptions. The rendered HTML is after JavaScript has run and is what Google will generally see. In Chrome, right click on the web page and choose ‘view page source’ to view the raw HTML, or ‘inspect’ element to view the rendered HTML. You can view the HTML of a web page to see a meta description. There’s a number of ways to view them, and the tool of choice will depend on whether you want to view just a single URL individually or a website in bulk. You can read more about meta description length later in this guide. The 70-155 character range for meta descriptions will avoid the majority from being cut off in snippets, while making the most of the space available. There isn’t an exact size limit for snippets, and Google does at times shift the size of their snippets in their results.

Google can use meta descriptions for snippets in its search results and it truncates the length typically to fit device limits. The optimum meta description length should be between 70 and 155 characters. The meta description tag should be placed in the head of the document and looks like this in HTML: Search engines can choose to use them to populate their search result snippets. The meta description or meta description tag, is an HTML element in the head of a webpage that should provide a concise summary of what a page is about. In this guide we take you through the fundamentals, as well as more advanced considerations and tactics when analysing, writing and optimising the humble meta description. Meta descriptions can be used in search engine result snippets, so writing a good meta description can be helpful for users and drive more clicks to a website.

Meta name description