What Is the Minimum Size for the Description Tag?
Description meta tags can offer an introduction to a page's content, "tease" a potential reader into clicking a search engine result or contain important key search phrases that don't appear in the article itself. What's the minimum size requirement for a description meta tag, and is it required at all?
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Definition
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A description meta tag appears between the "<head>" tags of a Web page and contains a short description of that page. The description on the home page of a site might contain an overview of the site itself. Users won't see the meta description while they're on your site, but it may appear as a search result "snippet" if it contains the search keywords. You can see the meta description of any Web page by viewing the page's source code.
Minimum Description Size
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There is no minimum required size for a description tag, and a tag of just 10 characters wont "break" anything. Even pages without a description will still be indexed and appear in search results. If a user searches for unique keywords in your short description, Google will still use your description in the search result snippet, filling out the snippet with body text from your page. However, Google Webmaster Tools will flag pages with a description under 50 characters long on its "HTML Suggestions" page and suggest that you ensure your descriptions accurately describe your site's content.
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Optimum Description Length
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The length of a description tag can also be problematic if it's too long. Search result snippets have a fixed maximum length of 150 to 160 characters, depending on the search engine, so meta descriptions longer than that may be cut off on a results page. It can therefore be said that a meta description tag should be between 50 and 150 characters long to appear most consistently within search results.
Best Practices
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Google highly recommends that you create meta descriptions that accurately describe the content of the corresponding pages. One short, well-crafted sentence can persuade a user to click through to your page. However, while for the vast majority of pages a description is helpful, some pages that can be found with a "long tail" of three or more keywords might be better off without a meta description at all, so that the keywords are more likely to appear in the search result snippet.
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References
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