How to Write Effective Meta Descriptions and Link Text for SEO

Hi there, I'm Corey with HubSpot Academy. In this video, we're going to cover writing effective meta descriptions and link text for SEO. But before we get started, don't forget to hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date with more educational content from HubSpot Academy. Ready to get started? Let's kick things off by talking about meta Descriptions when you conduct a search, how do you decide which result to click on? The page title and the meta description probably play huge roles in deciding that a resource is helpful to you. A meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a brief summary of a webpage. This brief snippet of text appears below the blue link in a search engine result. This description summarizes the content of the webpage linked above it. And although it's not an official ranking factor in the Google search engine results, it can be edited to help people understand what the web page is all about, which encourages them to click through. Take a look at this meta description example. Best Buy sells appliances and electronics in this example, the meta description reads Shop for washers and dryers@bestbuy.com and find deals on the top brands, from stacked units and front loaders to traditional washers and dryers. This meta description describes exactly what you'll see when clicking their link. Washers and dryers available for Purchase There are three reasons why you need a meta description. A meta description increases click through rates and visits from organic search, a meta description gives the right people the right information at the right time, and a meta description increases visits from social. Let's dig into each one of these. There might be 10 links per search engine results page, but they don't all get clicked equally. In fact, people are more likely to click results that are higher up on the page. For example, the one organic result spot is 10 times more likely to receive a click than the 10 spot. To get your result to rank well, however, you need people to start clicking on it. Meta descriptions entice people to click on your link instead of someone else's. Great meta descriptions can be powerful enough to get people to click on your link. Even even if you are below another search result, a meta description gives the right people the right information at the right time. Although meta descriptions don't directly influence your website's rank on Google, they can benefit you when people conduct an advanced search. An advanced search allows people to specify or exclude terms in the search results. There are a ton of advanced search options. An explicit phrase you can use quotes around the word that you want to appear. To exclude words, add a minus sign before the word that you want to exclude. You can also add or in all caps to view results for multiple search terms. This is why you want to get very specific when writing your meta descriptions. If your page content has specific words or phrases that people are searching for, you'll want to make sure that they're included in your meta descriptions. Google isn't the only website that displays your meta description when you publish a piece of content. Social networks like Facebook use what's called open graph to present the most important data on your webpage when you share it with your followers. The open graph includes a meta description. People on social media can see your meta description too. This example shows the meta description for a post sharing a link to the only in your state website on Facebook. The meta description for this page is these five trails in Massachusetts will lead you to extraordinary ancient ruins and and it appears at the bottom of the Facebook post. Your meta description doesn't just drive search engine traffic, it drives social media traffic too. Now that you know why you need a meta description, here's how to write an effective one. You're going to want to write compelling content. Include one or two keywords. Aim for 155 to 160 characters and avoid non alphanumeric characters. First, you're going to want to spend some time writing compelling content. This should be a short sentence, previewing the content or telling the searcher why they should give your post a read. Give them a clear benefit of clicking through and reading your post if necessary. When writing your meta description, be informative and then add value. The meta description is your chance to convey the value of your page to your viewers. Here's what an effective meta description could look like. This meta description clearly describes the contents of the webpage and compels the viewer to click by describing exactly what the user will learn. You might already include keywords in your webpage's body copy and the title, but the meta description should also include keywords that help describe the content of the webpage. Keywords in your meta description optimize your content to match with related search queries. Focus on one or two unique keywords in the meta description for each page. You don't want to stuff keywords anywhere that you can make sure that they fit naturally and help explain what people can expect to see if they click on your link. In our example, this search engine result uses one keyword in both the title and the meta. Responsive Web Design Next, aim for 155 to 160 characters in your description. The number of characters that make up your meta description is important, but when actually displaying this meta description, Google doesn't measure by characters, it measures by pixels. Your meta description will be cut off if it becomes too long. That's why you should aim for 155 to 160 characters in your meta description as a good benchmark. If you take a look back at our example, this meta description contains 156 characters and it is not cut off in the search engine results pages. Special characters might appear just fine on your computer screen, but search engines can't read those symbols very easily. These are known as non alphanumeric characters. Avoid using special characters like plus signs and em dashes in your meta descriptions. Special characters often don't appear in search results as you intended and they may be removed altogether. This meta description doesn't contain any special characters, so each word is displayed correctly in the search engine results page pages Want to test out how your meta descriptions will look before setting them live? Well? Check out the Snippet Optimizer tool in the Resources. Depending on the CMS that you're using, there will be different methods for editing your meta description, and some solutions are more technical than others. If you're using WordPress, the Yoast SEO is the Go to SEO solution. All you have to do is log into your WordPress dashboard, click on your posts and and edit your description. Other CMSs including Wix Squarespace and the HubSpot CMS Hub have an easy solution within the CMS itself. No plugin required in your cms, look for a page or post setting that allows you to edit the meta description. And for the technical marketers out there, your meta description can also be edited within the HTML of your individual page by editing the meta description field. Regardless of the solution that works for you, having a well written meta description will help improve your rankings in search engines and drive traffic to your webpage. On a webpage, descriptive link text is important for your SEO performance. A link description is the clickable word or words in hyperlink. Link descriptions help users and search engines better understand your content. Search engines will be better able to understand the purpose of your links and and the hierarchy of the post, and people will be more inclined to click a link that directly explains where the destination is. Let's take a look at an example link description from the HubSpot blog. Look at the blue hyperlink. This link description reads Social Media Content Marketing. When you click on the link, you're taken to the link destination, which is the ultimate guide to social media marketing. The link description perfectly describes the content of the destination page. So what does a bad link look like? Generic words like click here or learn more is not an effective link description. Google suggests these link descriptions. Best Practices first, stay on topic. Don't use text that has no relation to the page's content. Don't use page URLs as a link description unless you have a very good reason to do so, such as referencing a site's new address. Keep descriptions concise, aim for a few words or a short phrase, and also format links so that they're easy to spot. Let's take a look at some link descriptions and the page's HTML. On the left you see a bad link description. The link description click here is not specific to the blog post on website Optimization on the right, there's a good link description. Using the keyword website optimization as the link description makes it clear that the link is about that topic. In this example, replacing the click here link description with the keyword website optimization is a much better experience. It's a small change, but this effort really impacts your page's ranking and experience. So how do you edit link descriptions? This one's pretty easy. They can be edited directly in your HTML, just like in the examples we just covered. But no matter which CMS you're using to publish your content online, it is as simple as hyperlinking keywords by pressing command K or by clicking the hyperlink icon. With meta descriptions and link descriptions in place, you'll see better performance on search engines and deliver a better experience to your website visitors. To learn more about how to create high performing websites that drive traffic and convert leads, check out HubSpot Academy's free course on website optimization.