Google included examples of the best and worst practices to its documentation on how to write high-quality meta descriptions that will appear in the search results.
The documentation for managing the snippet in the search results was updated.
Metadata in Search Snippets
The summaries and descriptions of websites that rank in the search results are known as search snippets.
How to manage the search snippets in the search results is explained in Google's handbook.
The meta description and, occasionally, the actual text are the sources of the information utilized to create the search snippet.
The term "ransom notes" was sometimes used to describe meta descriptions that are created from the text of a page because they can seem to be random snippets with keywords in them.
With Google's update to the search snippet guidelines, there are now more illustrations of how to write meta descriptions correctly and incorrectly.
Meta description examples
Google provided samples of both good and bad meta descriptions in four areas.
The following are the four improper approaches to write meta descriptions:
Examples of bad categories
Keywords list
Google criticizes meta descriptions that are nothing more than a list of Keywords since they don't care to summarize anything.
Every news story uses the same summary
This is when meta descriptions are pre-written and used consistently across many online documents.
Not a summary of the page
This is an error that many meta descriptions make. It's simple to get into the habit of creating meta descriptions that are centered on the keyword phrase or the topic and forget to include a brief summary of the page's subject matter.
Too brief
This one is self-explanatory and resembles the last one somewhat. If the meta description is so brief that it fails to provide a summary of the webpage, it is not optimized.
Better Meta Description Examples
Google then provides illustrations of meta descriptions that are appropriate.
Describe the company, not its website.
The first example of a meta description is for a physical store that lists the products it sells, where it is located, and what hours it is open. This is intriguing because it gives a description of the company rather than what is on the website. In essence, that is data about the company that users are interested in.
Employ website content
A news story's meta description using a passage from the article itself serves as the second good example. That's also fascinating. If the CMS has a feature that only displays the first about 70 words of each piece, it is crucial to summarize the article's main points in the first sentence, which is a good practice to start with. It's encouraging to see that method proven because some forum software uses using the first sentence from a page of text as a solution.
Summarize
According to Google's third best practice, the ideal way to approach meta descriptions is to summarize the entire webpage. This sums up what Google most likely expects from a meta description.
S:searchenginejournal.com
