What is a meta description tag? It is a brief summary of a web page’s content and most often used by search engines to describe the page on a SERP (search engine results page).  The meta description tag appears between the clickable page title and the URL like so:

In the early days of web search, meta description tags played a significant role in search engine optimization.  They used to be one of the main factors in determining a site’s ranking.  Today, meta descriptions have little to no effect on ranking!  As far as search engines are concerned, a meta description tag is just that—a description.

Why waste time writing one then?  A new eye tracking study determined that searchers spend more time focusing on the description rather than the title or URL.  As you can see in the example above, Google “bolds” the keywords searched in the title, the URL, and the description.  So, the meta description tag serves as a powerful advertisement for your website.

Meta description tags won’t do much for your search engine ranking. But, writing a persuasive description will have great impact on your website’s click-through rate.  While meta description tags are not an effective SEO tool any longer, they provide valuable space for marketing calls-to-action.  Just think of them as the “prime real estate” of organic search results.  If done well, it may make the difference between users clicking your website versus the competition!