What is a meta description?
A meta description is the short summary in a page's head that search engines often, but not always, use as the snippet shown under the title in results.
It has not been a ranking factor for a long time, and Google has said so repeatedly. Its job is influencing whether someone clicks once the page is already ranking, by giving an accurate preview of what they'll find.
Google frequently rewrites it anyway, generating its own snippet from the page content when that is judged more relevant to the query than what was declared. Writing a good one is still worth doing, both for the cases where it is used and because summarising a page in one sentence is a useful discipline, but treat it as a suggestion rather than a guarantee of what will show.
Related
- Title tagA title tag is the HTML element declaring a page's name, shown as the clickable link in search results and often used as the label an assistant attaches to a page it cites.
- Open GraphOpen Graph is Facebook's protocol for controlling how a link looks when it's shared: the title, image and description shown in the preview card. It has nothing to do with schema.org and no bearing on search ranking.
- Structured dataStructured data is machine-readable markup, usually schema.org JSON-LD, that states explicitly what a page and its subject are.
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