I rarely ever change my Description Meta Tag because I know that the AIO will automatically use the first 160 characters of your content. Knowing this I make my first 160 characters as descriptive of my content as possible so I do not have to retype my Description Meta Tag.
I also make sure my keyword appears within the first 140 character spaces when at all possible. Why? Because most times Google will use the first 15 characters for the date the link was posted. When I can get my keyword within the first 140 characters (140 + 15 = 155) it gives me a greater chance of getting my keyword in the description and gives me 5 extra character spaces should I need them.
As seen in the above image my keywords (I actually have 2 keywords in my title this time) can be seen in the title, the permalink URL, and in the description. This is always my goal when starting my content. For this particular post I happened to have two keywords and they are…
- make easy money online – 377 Monthly Searches / 115 QSR (my target keyword)
- wedding supplies services – 1060 Monthly Searches / 56 QSR (a low hanging fruit keyword)
Now in the image above you can see my post in Google when searching for the keyword “make easy money online” with the first 13-15 character spaces taken up by Google for the time I published the blog. Again my keywords appear in the post title, the permalink URL, and in the Meta Description.
NEXT UP = Understanding the Keyword Meta Tag and Post Tags
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- AIO plugin does a bad job here. Your meta description is truncated. I would rather design it myself.
- In fact you do not know what Google shows to me as the snippet of your post. It is not necessarily the same what you see. So it may be almost useless as you rightly say, yet I always design myself the meta description and the meta title.
- For Bing it is still understood as a good practice to add meta description, so I would not miss it.
But it is true that it is totally up to Google to show what it feels is the best snippet that provides an answer to the search query typed in by anyone. This holds true for description meta that is both not written up or manually written.
About 2 percent of the time I will manually write up my own description if I cannot make it clear enough in the first couple of sentences what my content is about. But for the most part I have been successful doing it without.
I just always remember that Google is going to change the snippet that is displayed regardless of what is written. As long as I can use a descriptive sentence with my target keyword without it being truncated, I am happy with that.
When I deleted that I had no more problems!! :)
