How to Write Perfect Meta Descriptions (2024)

13/03/2021

How To Add Meta Descriptions:

Install an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO.
Go to the page or post you want to edit.
Scroll to the SEO section.
Type your meta description there.

Meta Descriptions

WordPress is one of the best platforms because it allows you to customize and control everything about your site. It gives you a full range of freedom with all of the bells and whistles you will need. One crucial area that you can tweak is your site’s SEO.

Your site’s SEO is vital to attaining traffic and growing your site. SEO can be helpful because it lets you find the best way to present content to your target audience. It can improve traffic, site growth, click-through rate, retention time, and much more.

SEO is one of the main driving factors for your site’s growth potential and monetizability. The better traffic and audience targeting your site has, the faster it will attract users and customers. Tweaking SEO is also one of the first things you should do to have a professional website.

Thus making SEO a component of your site you should always aim to improve. One of the best things you can improve for SEO is the meta descriptions of pages and posts. Meta descriptions can affect SEO because it is one of the first things that users see.

In this article, I will explain how you can edit and create meta descriptions in WordPress with and without plugins. I will explain the best practices for creating persuasive and eye-catching meta descriptions. In the end, your site might even have a 6% increase in click-through rate.

What They Do

To start, a meta description is a section of text that appears in the search engine under the title and URL. The meta description is supposed to display a brief description of what the page is about. The image below shows what the average meta description should look like:

Meta descriptions are often associated with meta keywords, although these two things are vastly different. Meta descriptions and keywords are apart of the set of metadata for your site. Metadata is simply just data and code that tells the search engine about your website.

Metadata includes everything from titles, keywords, descriptions, and more. One of the most used things is meta keywords, though people have started to deprecate them and limit their use. Their purpose is now done by the meta description instead.

Meaning that you do not have to worry about them anymore, since they are virtually useless. Many people recommend to use and optimize them, though most modern search engines do not use them. If anyone says that you should add meta keywords, it is misleading information.

SEO has shifted from editing things in your HTML code like meta keywords to editing the content itself. Focus has shifted to making your content more suitable and improving your site’s performance. Modern search engines make things like meta descriptions useless.

These meta descriptions can heavily impact your SEO, even if they do not directly change SEO. They are going to be seen by users whenever they search for something and your site appears. This means that people are going to constantly see and read them.

Thus, your meta descriptions should be optimized and hand-crafted to catch the attention of users. Your descriptions should be clean, short, direct, and eye-catching. By having good meta descriptions, you can increase the click-through rate greatly.

Increases in click-through rate do not only mean that you will get more traffic. A well-made meta description can increase how long a user stays on your site as well. If your description is good enough, they may even buy your product and service.

In the next section, you will find out what makes a good meta description and how to make one for yourself. You will learn the basic practices every WordPress user should use to create their descriptions. Everything from voice and tone to the length and keyword research.

The Best Practices

There are many things you can do to improve your meta descriptions and make them distinct. Similar to copywriting, creating a meta description can be a very complex and deep process. There is a lot of things you need to consider when creating a good meta description.

This process may seem monotonous and time-consuming, but it couldn’t be easier. In this section, I will break down the basic principles surrounding a well-made meta description. I will also focus on exactly how to master these principles through very basic practices.

The few basic components that determine the quality of a meta description are length, voice, keywords, call-to-action, and directness. Once you use our simple practices, you will master all of these basic elements to making the perfect meta description.

The first component to a good meta description is the length. The length of your meta description should usually never exceed 150-160 characters. Any more than that might result in the search engine cutting off some of the text. There is no specific cut off point, but 160 characters is a good place.

Just makes sure to not bloat your text with unnecessary parts or any fluff. Then again, an extremely short description may not get the point across as well. Aiming for 150 well-written characters is all that matters, so make sure to choose the quality of your words over quantity.

Keyword focus is very important to your overall SEO when creating the meta description. You must ensure that the keyword for the page is found in the description enough times. You do not need high keyword-density, but focusing the content on the keyword can be very beneficial.

Create well-written content that is cohesive, flows well, and offers value to the reader. You need to make sure that your writing is unique and attention-grabbing. Then ensure that the content itself flows well and has a sense of cohesion. Write about what makes your page unique to others.

The other main thing you need to put your attention to is grammar and syntax. It should be obvious that you need to have grammatically correct and high-quality sentences with no errors. You should also avoid wording such as “click here” and repetitive phrases. Avoid deceptive wording because it can damage your SEO.

The other thing you should put your focus on when writing is a call to action. You need to make sure that you are using the active voice and creating a call to action. There should be something for the reader to do when they read your description. The call to action should be attention-grabbing and actionable.

Using the right tone and brand voice is also crucial to creating a good meta description. Your text should contain a consistent voice and tone throughout. Your writing should also follow the brand voice and style of your website and business.

In conclusion, when creating and writing a meta description, you have to keep these basic principles in mind. By following these practices, you can write much better descriptions that grab attention and keep the reader reading. By using these practices correctly you can achieve perfection with your descriptions.

Add Descriptions With a Plugin

The first and best way to edit and create meta descriptions is by using a plugin. Plugins will allow you to add and edit meta descriptions with no hassle. To start, you need to get an SEO plugin that has this feature. The best all-in-one SEO plugins are Rank Math SEO and Yoast SEO.

Once you have decided on a plugin, you will just need to install and activate them. To edit a meta description, you need to find the page or post you want to edit. Click on Edit and then scroll down until you find the SEO plugin’s section.

The SEO section should include an area that displays the URL, title, and meta description. You can type and edit the meta description for the page there. After typing the meta description, make sure to save your changes. The SEO section for your plugin should look something like this:

In that section, you should type in your meta description. It is good to try to make your meta description based on the best practices. However, most SEO plugins will now help your write one and show you what to do. So you should have no trouble coming up with a meta description.

Another thing you should consider is making use of the excerpt. If you create a meta description, it is a common practice to copy and paste it into the excerpt section at the bottom of the page/post editor. Doing this will also help search engines identify your pages.

In the next section, I will show you how to add and edit meta descriptions to your site without using a plugin. Just make sure to try out a plugin, because changing code directly can often cause problems on your site. This is why I recommend using a plugin instead of having no plugin.

Add Descriptions Without a Plugin

The next way of editing and creating meta descriptions is without using any plugins. This method is a hassle and does not allow fully custom descriptions for each page. Thus, I highly recommend using the plugins instead because you may mess up something by doing this.

If you are don’t want to use a plugin to edit meta descriptions, you should expect it to be difficult. Plugins often make it much easier to write better meta descriptions, not just access and create them. Before you begin, you must open an FTP client and back-up your site for safety.

First, we have to create a general meta description for your site. This generic tag will apply to every page on your site. To do this, go to your WordPress dashboard and then to General under Settings. Finally, write your meta description under the section called Tagline.

Secondly, you need to go to Theme Editor under the Appearance tab. If you do not see the theme editor, you can access the code through the header.php file. Find the part in the side-bar called Theme Header and edit it. Check the image below:

<meta name="description" content="" />

After doing this, every post and page on your site will contain the tagline we created earlier. However, this is not useful because all of your pages have the same meta description. This code only supports a generic description used across all of your pages and posts.

This may seem a little pointless because you cannot add custom descriptions to each page and post. This problem can be a hassle because your blog posts should always have a unique meta description. Thankfully, there is a simple fix to this problem.

With some simple code, you can have the search engine generate a meta description for you. The code makes the search engine look at your post’s information and create a custom meta description from it. To achieve this, you need to replace the previous code with this and add the < sign before meta and after the first question mark:

meta name="description" content="?php if ( is_single() ) {
        single_post_title('', true); 
    } else {
        bloginfo('name'); echo " - "; bloginfo('description');
    }

After adding the code, make sure to save the file and then exit. This method should have added a tagline to all of your site’s pages and posts. Just make sure to follow all of the best practices listed in this guide to create the best meta description.

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