How the SEO Meta description indicator works.

The SEO Meta description is found at the bottom of the SLURP article editor, this description gives a brief overview of the article.

It assists not only the reader in getting a quick and clear indication of what they are about to read, but it also gives a search “BOT” and an idea of what it’s about to “read”, which instead of calling it reading, we call it scraping. 

Where Meta Descriptions Help

In this instance to help the BOT, we write a 130 – 150 character description for the BOT, telling it what it is about to read, and what to expect. This also applies to humans to also give them an idea of what they are about to read.

About the Indicator Bar

From this image, notice that because there is no description, therefore, there is no rating.

If I add a few words, the bar increases, however, because it’s only a few characters, the bar is low, and therefore, not much can be explained to the BOT what the article is about:

If I add a few more transition words, the scroll bar increases, because it gives more detail, however, it could improve.

If I extend the sentences, the bar is still orange even though the character count is high, although this is better, the character count is too high, and back to being orange.

What this means is that our description may be “cut off” in the search engine results.

Search Companies limit text so that the results are neat to prevent different size “boxes” when we as users, see the search results for a specific topic. 

In other words, it will look messy if some pages have a lot of text, and others have less.  In this case, the search results will cut off the text and use an ellipsis, “…”.

The TL;DR Dilemma

If the text is cut off with an ellipsis it can have a negative effect on human behaviour.

As humans, when we see this ellipsis, we know automatically, that there is more to read. 

The negative effect comes into effect, which is that when we are doing a quick search, our behaviour dictates that we want information fast and will scan through.

When we see the ellipsis, our brain understands there is more information, but because there is an ellipsis, there is more to read, and because I want fast results, I will automatically think this article is “TL;DR” (Too Long; Didn’t Read), so likely to be skipped, and therefore not continue to click the article.

This is not always true, but because there is a likelihood, this is circumvented, putting parameters to help prevent this, by adhering to a character limit.

So as a rule of thumb, search companies tell us to try and keep the description at around 130-157 characters to prevent the TL;DR dilemma, so we just have to tweak a little. 

But there is a catch.

The reason why there is such a variance of 130-157, maybe 160 characters, is the issue with spaces, and spacing. This space is considered as “Whitespace”, and to a BOT, it sees it as a character, to us humans, we just see it as a space between two words.

Now it gets trickier. 

Some sentences may have shorter words and more spaces, other sentences have longer words, but fewer spaces, this can affect the quality of the SEO description.

As mentioned, a “whitespace”, is a simple space between words, but then there is physical length. 

Consider the following sentences:

1. Hello How Are You – Has 3 whitespaces (spaces between the words)
2. Hello   How   Are   You – As humans, we still see this as a sentence and it is still readable, but now there are three spaces between the words, so in total there are 9 whitespaces, and the BOT sees 9 additional characters.

But there is more, because, there is the matter of sentence length.

Now consider these two sentences:

• Wow, What a Wonderful Day
• Too, How A Terrific Morning

These sentences have the same number of letters, the same number of words, the same number of spaces, same number of punctuation marks. 

However, if we look at the actual length of each sentence, one is physically longer than the other. This is why it is also difficult to determine the exact number of characters for descriptions due to word-spaces (For instance W is wider than most letters, so the whitespacing will be affected.).

This is why in some sentences you can paste as 150 characters it will be green, other times, with other sentences with 150 characters, it will be orange, the reason being, that there may be more whitespaces and fewer words, longer words and fewer whitespaces. 

So that is why we cannot say it is a fixed number of characters. We have to tweak it a little.

Tweaking Text

Back to the SEO Description. If I take the previous example, note that by taking the last sentence out “Explore the charm of this iconic city.”, the bar dropped and went green, which tells us that the whitespacing and character count is OK. 

But we can tweak just a little more.

What we can do, is try and squeeze just a little bit more out of this, and try to change the structure slightly of our sentences, we could get a higher value. We can move a few words around:  Move “charming” before experiences, and place “iconic”, before cultural. A small and simple tweak, and we have managed to maximize our points.

From this, we have the sweet spot of the character count, we don’t get whitespace ellipsis, the BOT is happy, the Human is happy, and our page score increases.