How to write effective meta descriptions
The meta description carry snippets of up to 320 characters, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a page’scontent. This summary is displayed by the search engines along with the website title.
A thoughtfully written meta description helps you get more and more visitors to your website.
MOZ columnist Dr. Peter J. Meyers has shared some useful tips on writing effective meta descriptions.
Meyers says, “We know that longer snippets do still exist. Note, though, that both of these snippets come from Wikipedia, which is an exception to many SEO rules. Are these long descriptions only fringe cases? Looking at the mean (or even the median, in this case) doesn’t really tell us.
The big picture, part 1
Sometimes, you have to let the data try to speak for itself, with a minimum of coaxing. Let’s look at all of the snippets that were cut off (ending in “…”) and remove video results (we know from previous research that these skew a bit shorter). This leaves 42,863 snippets (just under half of our data set).
This looks very different from our data back in December, and is clearly clustered in the 150–175 character range. We see a few Google display snippets cut off after the 300+ range, but those are dwarfed by the shorter cut-offs”.
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