Meta Description
The grey paragraph beneath the title on a results page. Not a ranking input, and the largest single influence on whether the result gets clicked.
Analogy Mental model
The blurb on the back of a book. Two or three sentences telling you what is inside and why it deserves your evening.
In practice What you actually do
Aim for 150 to 160 characters. Name the problem, name the outcome, and end with what the page actually provides: a template, a calculator, a checklist. Query terms appear bolded when they match, so place them where they would fall naturally anyway.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Google routinely ignores the description and lifts a sentence from the page that fits the query better. When that happens, the paragraph you wrote describes a page the visitor is not being shown, or answers a question they did not ask.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →