One of the most important SEO aspects of a business blog is the meta description. The meta description is the short, descriptive sentence that appears with a search engine result. The meta description serves as a great place not only to include a keyword, but also to describe your blog post or web page in a way that entices potential visitors.
Meta descriptions are short, only 150 characters, but it's critical that it's written well. The description is one of the first things a Google or Bing user will see when looking at your search result. Here are four quick tips to writing a good meta description:
- Include at Least One Keyword - Search engines do consider the meta description when ranking web pages for keywords. So, not including a keyword (or not having a description) is just a waste of an opportunity. Make sure that it's the same keyword that you're optimizing in your post, blog title, and title tags.
- Make it Interesting - "This is a blog post about x, y, z," is just boring. This info should be obvious from the blog title. Use a question or actionable words to make it enticing to a web visitor i.e. Learn how to do x, Having trouble with y? Read about z, and what it means today. This sort of language give the potential web visitor a reason to click on your link and to read your post.
- Keep it to 150 Characters - Anything more than that will be truncated, and will not look so good in the results. If you don't write a meta description, some blogging platforms will just take the first 150 characters of your post, which will appear truncated if it happens to cut off in the middle of a word or sentence. Write a whole new meta description, and keep it short.
- Don't Keyword Stuff - One or two keywords at the most should be used in a meta description. It's not a place to stuff keywords. The meta description is called a description for a reason. It needs to describe the blog post or web page, even if you only have 150 characters to do it.
Although the meta description only appears on the search engine results, it's an important aspect of business blogging and writing a blog post. Every web page and individual post needs to have a meta description, or else you're throwing away an opportunity to sell the contents of your web page or blog post.