If you have an ecommerce , it is essential that you do everything possible to make your online store known. Surely you have heard of SEO optimization and terms such as meta title, meta description, etc. You can use these techniques to drive organic traffic to your online store.
You may have already started optimizing various aspects of your store, such as product text and images, but you may have some difficulty optimizing your meta descriptions.
We created this article to help business owners fully understand what description meta tags are and how to write perfect meta descriptions. By the end of this guide, you'll have all the SEO knowledge you need to create the ideal meta description for your site's pages.
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Meta description: what is it?
Meta tag description
A meta description, or meta description, is a snippet of text that summarizes the content of a page.
It is a "meta tag", which is an HTML element that is used by both users and search engines to understand what they will find by clicking on the link. It is also called the "snippet" of the page.
Together with the meta title and other "meta" elements, the description meta tag is one of the aspects to be optimized when doing SEO, by inserting the main keyword.
Meta description length: how many characters?
The meta description has a maximum length of 160 characters.
In reality, since the number of visible characters is not fixed but depends on the size of the individual letters (an "m" takes up more space, or pixels, than an "i"), it is advisable to place between 150 and 160 characters for avoid truncations.
What does the meta description look like, in the HTML code and on the page?
The meta description is a strip of code that looks like this:
meta description example code
Does it look Arabic to you? It is actually another language, that of computers. But don't worry, you will simply have to write in Italian in the box dedicated to the Meta Description of your management system.
Surely you have already seen some meta descriptions on the Google search results page.
Each time you enter a search keyword on Photo Editing Services Google, you will be presented with a SERP (search results page). On this SERP you will find various results that are related to your search. Below you can see part of a SERP for the search " Oberlo ".
meta description oberlo
Here you can see two main features. The first is the blue text you see in the image above, which is known as the 'Title Tag'. The function of the Title Tag is to show the title of the page.
Below you will find the meta description, which has a simple function: to inform visitors and prompt them to click on your link.
Why meta descriptions are important
As a store owner, you will want to do everything in your power to make your products known to your potential customers. Meta descriptions help you increase your click-through rate from three main sources: search engine results, social media shares, and social bookmarks.
In all three of these sources, a meta description can provide more information about the page and help grab the reader's attention.
While search engines have confirmed that they don't directly use meta descriptions in the ranking algorithm, Google uses a page's CTR (Click Through Rate) to evaluate how well your web page fits the search query. Since meta descriptions help increase your page's CTR, they are a great way to increase your ranking on Google.