Meta Description

The meta description is the short text under the title in a search result. It sits as a meta tag in the page's HTML and works as your ad copy in the organic results: one or two sentences giving the searcher a reason to click your listing.

Google does not use the meta description as a direct ranking factor. It is still one of the most overlooked handles in practical SEO, because it affects CTR, the share of searchers who click. More clicks from the same rankings are pure gain, and across hundreds of pages it adds up.

Google treats the description as a suggestion rather than a fixed answer. When the result is shown, the text is cut at around 150 to 160 characters, and where Google judges that an excerpt from the page matches the query better, it writes its own version. Large SERP studies keep finding rewrites in more than half of cases.

That does not make the tag pointless. On product and category pages a precise description is often the difference between being seen and being skipped in a crowded result page. The old misconception is that keywords in the description lift rankings. They do not, though Google bolds the searcher's own words in the snippet, so a match with the query still matters for the click. Lengths and examples sit in the guide to titles and meta descriptions.