Hi Jill,

Is there any limit either in total words or characters that you should use for the meta description? Someone within the company is looking to use the first paragraph of an article or 300 words, whichever is shorter. This seems excessive to me. Any guidelines?

Thanks,

Donna

Jill's Response

Hi Donna,

There are certainly guidelines for this sort of thing, but no, there is really no limit. One of the biggest mistakes people make when thinking about SEO is that they believe there are certain hard and fast rules and if you don't follow them you will either get penalized or never see high rankings. Let me be the first to tell you that there are no real rules. No formulas. No magic words.

But as to the meta description tag, first know that most likely the words you put in that tag won't actually help you gain rankings in the search engines. This tag does serve a purpose, however. It's often a way to get a nice description of your page to show up in the search results if your page does rank highly. Your best bet is to write a succinct sentence or 2 which use the keyword phrases that sum up the article. If the first paragraph does that nicely, you could certainly put that into your meta description tag, but you wouldn't really gain any benefit from that, as the engines would probably pick up that "snippet" anyway, assuming it is using the keyword phrases people might find the page for in the engines.

For more info on this tag, please read my past newsletter article "Getting a Great Description."

Jill

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