Meta descriptions for individual posts, categories, etc.?

jacal1 · Jul 15, 2011

Hi all. While I know that meta descriptions remain a good thing for entire pages or my blog as a whole, are they really that helpful for smaller bits such as singular blog posts and individual categories as far as seo goes? It seems cumbersome to try to do a description for each one, and I have a feeling I am wasting my time...

Thanks!!

Blossom · Jul 15, 2011

Google said that meta descriptions don't count towards SEO. Whether that's true or not, what they definitely do count towards is click throughs. Google a few of your pages and see how they come across - e.g. do you just have a date and some navigation words where your meta description should be, or do you have some nice keyword-rich text?

Bear in mind that it depends on what keywords you search with. Google will try to pull the most relevant sentences from your page to form the description. So from a click through perspective, it can actually be an advantage not to set your meta description because the visitor will often be shown sentences/parts of sentences with the search term they've just used.