How to Write an Effective Website Description Tag

The description tag in a webpage is the first piece of copy that people will see.

This is because it’s what search engines like Google display in their search results. So getting an effective description tag can increase the number of visitors to a website.

Here is how Apple appears in Google search:

Notice how the search words appear in bold in the description - in this case I searched for ‘Apple’. The description is packed full of relevant keywords, because the bold words in the description are very eye catching on a search results page.

The HTML which determines this is the meta description tag. In the case of Apple, it is this:

<meta name="Description" content="Apple designs and creates the iPhone, iPad, Mac notebooks and desktop computers, iOS 8, OS X, iPod and iTunes, and the new Apple Watch." />

The current suggested length is 115 characters. It used to be longer, but descriptions have been getting shorter with the growth of mobile browsing.

It’s important to get the length of your description as close to this as possible. If the description is too short then an error will be flagged in Google Webmaster Tools, and the description tag will be ignored by Google, and an auto generated one will be used instead. If it’s too long, then it’ll be truncated.

Writing a summary can be difficult though. Trying to boil down a webpage into a sentence is tricky. The best approach I’ve found is to look at the most frequent words in the webpage, and string those together into a description. This results in a description which is rich in keywords. That’s what Sumupr lets you do.

Paste the content of your webpage into the ‘Original Content’ box, and click ‘Find keywords’. This will provide you with an overview of the themes of the webpage. Then use the ‘Summary’ box to write a description of the right length, using the keywords as inspiration.