In 2016, my colleague Christopher Ratcliff wrote an excellent how-to guide to meta deions here on Search Engine Watch.
Much of what is included in this article is still useful. Chris 'good and bad examples are still relevant today, and you would do a lot worse than write your own deions according to his takeaway checklist, even two years later.
Google is increasingly unpredictable in the way it displays meta deions . Today, the lonHow much it truncates the deions can vary considerably from one result to another. Sometimes the service automatically generates or modifies deions. We are even seeing SERPs with far fewer deions used at all with the rise of other rich features such as reply boxes and carousels.
Let's take a look at some examples and consider the best meta deion practices for 2018.
First of all: what are meta deions ?
Meta-deions are a small piece of written content marked up in the HTML of a web page.
Good, elaborate examples usually ate up on the information given in the title tag and is intended to entice the searcher to click. They can give an idea of the content of this page by describing it…
… or by providing an extract…
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They sometimes give a broader deion of the site.
And if the result is a mark, the meta-deion could describe brand more generally.
We often associate meta deions to gray text displayed below the URL in search results. They also appear when pages are shared on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
Deions can also be tweaked specifically for optimization for Facebook using Open Graph markup and for Twitter using Twitter Cards .
Length of meta-deions - they change
Until recently, it was common practice for Google to set a fairly predictable limit for the length of meta-deions. Like ChrAs he points out in his last piece, we would expect deions to be generally truncated to around 135-160 characters. But this is no longer the case.
Examples of SERPs above (for the phrase 'best baby weaning foods ') include a truncated meta deion for Netmums to around 330 characters, as well as shorter deions more in line with the classic length of 135-160 characters.
We can also infer that Google's algorithm judges the usefulness of the meta-deion - choosing to include more if it is likely to respond quickly to the searcher's query .
We can also see the Mother & Baby result which clearly seems to have been written with traditional character boundaries in mind. This is still, I would say, themost compelling deion of the bunch in terms of making me want to click. But, we can clearly see from this results page that experimenting with longer meta deions is now an option for marketers.
Variations between mobile and computer?
When it comes to thinking about our search results in the mobile context, is Google more severe with how long meta deions can be on longer screens? small? Surely the search engine wants to devote more space to links and titles than to deions?
Let's compare the results above with their fairness on mobile SERPs.
The short answer: there is - at least for this query - very little difference between the way Google presents deions on different screens.
We must accept a number of caveats. It's only a query, in a niche, on just a few devices, but it's pretty enlightening. The two longest meta deions in desktop SERPs are kept the same length on mobile.
But that doesn't mean Google isn't making changes for SERPs on portable devices.
The well-crafted Mother & Baby result is tightened by a few characters, removing "finger friendly ". Say nothing more, we all haveresponses, including ". If we dive into the source text, we can get a better picture of what's going on.
In this case, Google is smart enough to truncate the meta deion tagged in order to privilege the text of the page containing keywords . It does this on desktops and - to a slightly more severe extent - on mobiles.
But the rule is not as simple as assuming that mobile deions should be shorter. As the previous examples prove that if the deion includes relevant key phrases or answers the query well, Google is happy to include longer snippets, even on mobile.
The meta -deions in the age of rich features
Google is clearly improving continuously to understand our intent as researchers.
Its algorithm makes a judgment about this before deciding how much or how little deion extract to include. But he might well decide to include a lot of rich features in the SERPs. These include answer boxes, info graphics - as well as things in and around the deion itself, such as star ratings and "Go to ... " links.
As I explained in a recent article on visibility in modern SERPs , it depends on the quality of the markup of your content for the search engine to include thesefeatures.
Interestingly, for all the feature rich SERPs of today, the humble Meta deion is still incredibly important. In fact, with Google's desire to feature longer deions - we might even argue that 300 well-designed character deions could improve visibility as well as CTRs.
Google is getting smarter and smarter, but it does its best if it is evident from the way our content is written and tagged. The trick is to strike the right balance in making sure that your markup alerts search spiders to relevant information on your page and making sure that your meta deion is useful to your reader.
Google will have the latest word to know if it considers other content on your site to be more useful based on your intention.be a researcher - and may well display an extract modified accordingly. If it has this option, thanks to the efforts we put into our site SEO , we can expect the best experience for our researchers.
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