The meta descrip­tion tag is the title tag’s best friend – a sub­head­line to your page’s head­line, if you will. A promise of what peo­ple will find when they click through from the search results to your site. So it’s impor­tant to ensure you’re writ­ing unique descrip­tions for every page and opti­miz­ing this key bit of code.

There are four crit­i­cal rea­sons why you should take con­trol of your website’s meta descrip­tion tags right now.

1. They Show Up In The Search Results

Let’s rewind for a minute to bet­ter under­stand how descrip­tion tags work and why they are impor­tant. The descrip­tion tag is part of your meta infor­ma­tion, which is housed in the head sec­tion on the code side of your page. Along with the title tag, the descrip­tion tag serves as the text that shows up in the search result snip­pet. While this tag does­n’t have the same weight as the title tag in terms of rank­ing, it does com­mu­ni­cate to the search engines what the page is about, and a pow­er­ful page descrip­tion entices searchers to click through to your site.

2. Entice Click-Throughs To Your Website

Sim­ply describ­ing in a gener­ic way what’s on the page is not com­pelling enough to entice clicks (e.g., “This is a post about dog sweaters. Click through.”). It has to sup­port the most impor­tant mes­sage of the page, address­ing the user’s intent and the pur­pose of the page. So, if it’s a prod­uct page, you’ll want to include the most impor­tant infor­ma­tion about the prod­uct. If it’s a blog post, you’ll want to include a descrip­tion that makes the user want to read more. Includ­ing in your descrip­tion tag the most impor­tant key­words for the page (in a nat­ur­al way) will also send a sig­nal to the searcher that your page is the right place to be, because in the search results, search engines like Google will bold the words in the descrip­tion that match the searcher’s query. And don’t for­get you can use struc­tured data in descrip­tion tags, too. Google gives this exam­ple:

For exam­ple, news or blog post­ings can list the author, date of pub­li­ca­tion, or byline infor­ma­tion. This can give poten­tial vis­i­tors very rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion that might not be dis­played in the snip­pet oth­er­wise. Sim­i­lar­ly, prod­uct pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered through­out a page. A good meta descrip­tion can bring all this data togeth­er. For exam­ple, the fol­low­ing meta descrip­tion pro­vides detailed infor­ma­tion about a book. <meta name=“Description” content=“Author: A.N. Author, Illus­tra­tor: P. Pic­ture, Cat­e­go­ry: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages”> In this exam­ple, infor­ma­tion is clear­ly tagged and sep­a­rat­ed.

Test­ing shows you can improve click-through rates via the descrip­tion tag. One study by Adobe showed a lift in click-through rates when they includ­ed a brand­ed term towards the front of the descrip­tion tag (keep­ing in mind that brand is a key aspect of their prod­uct).

3. Autosnippets Stink

If you put noth­ing in your descrip­tion tag, search engines will cre­ate a descrip­tion for you in the search result snip­pet (a.k.a. “autosnip­pet”). And you might not like it. On the oth­er hand, no mat­ter how much work you put into craft­ing a per­fect descrip­tion tag, Google reserves the right to gen­er­ate its own descrip­tion to dis­play in the search results based on what it thinks is best for the user. In those instances, the search engine deter­mines what text on the page would be ide­al to dis­play instead of the descrip­tion you pro­vid­ed. One source that Google uses to cre­ate autosnip­pets is the Open Direc­to­ry Project, and you can pre­vent Google from using infor­ma­tion there by adding a spe­cif­ic meta tag to your pages.

4. Social Networks Use Them

When you share your con­tent on cer­tain social net­works and social book­mark­ing sites, they pull the meta descrip­tion as a sum­ma­ry of the con­tent. If that descrip­tion is miss­ing, bor­ing, or not entic­ing enough, it may not elic­it the engage­ment you’re hop­ing for. Meta descrip­tion tags are an impor­tant part of your page’s struc­ture, but they are often over­looked. In organ­ic search, every lit­tle bit we can do to help our con­tent be found and entice users to click through is crit­i­cal in the super com­pet­i­tive world of search.