SEO mistakes: Do not use Meta Description or use any text in it.

Many people make the mistake of misusing the Meta Description or worse still, NOT using it at all.

What is the Meta Description for?

The meta description has two main uses.

1- Help the search engine: Although this had a much greater weight before, it is still very useful to include keywords and phrases to help the search engine to catalog your page.

2- Give the user a reason to visit us: Including a salad of keywords in our meta description does not say anything to the visitor, we must remember that behind the screen there is a person who is looking for useful information and not keyword stuffing.

Having a short and attractive description gives the visitor a reason to click us, we can even include our phone number or some other important information. If we get a sale before they click, so much the better!

This is a good example:

Some practical tips:

1- Avoid writing descriptions of more than 160 characters.

2- Make sure that our description is unique on each page

3- Try to include some of our benefits, offers, guarantees, calls to action and maybe even some form of contact.

4- Use the main keyword or phrase of the page that we want to optimize, if our meta description does not use the keyword at least once, search engines tend to show text from our content that does contain that keyword.

The Meta Description together with the Title are our business card in the SERPs and should provide a specific and attractive information about the information that our potential visitor is going to find.