Meta description

A meta description is the short summary declared in <meta name="description">. Search engines are not obliged to use it and frequently rewrite the snippet from page content when they judge that a better match for the query exists, which is most of the time on long pages.

It is not a ranking factor and has not been one for many years. What it influences is click-through rate, which makes it worth writing carefully anyway.

Practical guidance. Keep it under roughly 155 to 160 characters, since longer text is truncated. Write it as a sentence a person would read rather than a keyword list. Include the differentiating fact, because the competing results on the page will all claim the generic benefits. Make each page’s description distinct; duplicates across a site are a common and easily fixed problem on generated pages.

On a directory listing your tagline usually becomes your meta description, which is one more reason the tagline is the highest-leverage field you will write. Ten to eighty characters of specific, adjective-free description does double duty in the feed and in the search result.