Meta Description

A page of search results puts ten entries side by side, and on titles alone they all look much the same. A title is short enough to say what a page is about and no more; it doesn't say whether the page answers your question.

So the two lines under the title took over that judgment. The problem is that leaving the slot empty lets the search engine cut an arbitrary passage out of the page to fill it. That happened to a post Ravi wrote on the Pagedeck blog. It ranked third and almost nobody arrived; the summary slot held a truncated fragment of the top navigation. Two weeks spent on the ranking were being wasted by those two lines.

A meta description is where you write those two lines yourself. It isn't a device for raising a ranking; it's a device for collecting people from a ranking you already have.

Put one sentence near the top of the page's code and that sentence goes into the summary slot of the result. It isn't an input to ranking, so stuffing it with keywords moves nothing while readers move on, unable to tell what the sentence means.

Length is set by where the text gets cut. Assume the tail disappears past roughly 150 characters and put what matters at the front. Phones cut it shorter still, so check it there before settling.

When the searched words appear in your sentence, that part shows in bold — reason enough to use the words people actually search for.

The sentence isn't always used, though. Search engines will pull a passage that fits a particular query better, especially when what you wrote doesn't really summarize the page. Whether the page answers what the searcher wanted, which is content quality, comes first even here.

Two habits cover the writing. Say what question the page answers and what the reader gets from it, and write a different one for every page. Copy one sentence across the whole site and, with ten results side by side, nothing distinguishes yours again.

Against the title tag — the blue clickable heading — the work divides: the title says what the page is about, the summary says why to click. Put the same words in both and you've thrown away one of your two lines.

"We rank third and get no clicks. Start with the summary line."

The problem may be the wording in the results page rather than the position.

"Leave that empty and it picks up a chunk of the nav."

Without a value, the search engine helps itself to any passage from the page.

"It repeats the title. That's a wasted line."

The title and the summary are doing the same job.

Ravi built a field for this sentence into the publishing flow afterwards. A post can't be published with it empty, and anything past the cut-off length shows in gray. Rewriting just this sentence on twelve existing posts, with nothing done to their rankings, brought in 1.4 times the traffic on average. Not a word of the posts themselves changed.