Q and A: Is it important to have a unique meta description for each web page?

QuestionDear Kalena,

About page description: Do I have to make it all unique for example Description of the site is ‘123’ so other pages as Electronics Description is ‘123’ or I can make related to category ‘Buy laptop’??

Amr

Hi Amr,

If I am not wrong, I believe that you are referring to the Meta Description Tag which is usually (not always) used by search engines to create a short text preview for each web result displayed for a particular search query.

According to Google, “using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn’t very helpful” and therefore is not recommended. Since no two webpages are ideally the same, each one of them should have a unique description. And since Meta Description Tag is no longer used to rank webpages, there is absolutely not point in stuffing them with keywords.

But it is not just about having unique Meta Description for every webpage; its utility goes far beyond that. Meta Description is like your Ad which is displayed in organic search results. The better your Ad is, the more clicks you are likely to get. It is therefore important that you pay careful attention to each page description you write.

A perfect Page/Meta Description should have the following characteristics:

  1. Describe the page content accurately and concisely while staying within the 160 character limit.
  2. Serve as a perfect Ad copy – informative and enticing.
  3. Incorporate targeted keywords to establish relational relevance between search query and search result, and capitalize on bolding done by search engines.

Writing a killer Ad is not easy and same is the case with Meta Description. Therefore when it comes to writing Meta Description, I usually draw inferences from my best performing Ad Copies. It gives me a good indication of what has and what hasn’t worked for me in the past. You can do the same.

Hope it helps.

Saurav Verma
Kneoteric eSolutions