Nora Brown Design

Writing meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are snippets of text associated with each page in your site. They are not visible to the end user, but they are to search engines. While Google says they don’t use meta descriptions in determining search rankings, they will display the description on the search result page, so a good description can improve your “click-through rate.”

The meta description on my site as shown in Google search results.

You can find in-depth recommendations for writing good meta descriptions on the Google blog. In summary, they include:

• Create descriptions that accurately describe each specific page. Use an overall site description on the homepage, as well as section descriptions and individual page descriptions.
• Your description doesn’t have to be in sentence form. The data should be clear and human-readable, but it doesn’t have to be a sentence. For example “Designer: Nora Brown design, Project scope: Logo and web design, Client: Peace of Mind Organizing, Dates: 2004 to present” might be a good description for a page in my online portfolio.