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The Importance of Meta Descriptions for SEO
A meta description (sometimes called a meta description attribute or tag) is an HTML element that describes and summarizes the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines. While meta data isn't as important for SEO rankings as it used to be, the meta description still plays a significant role in on-page SEO.

In this article, you'll learn:

What "meta description" means, as well as how to view your site's meta description, and how it impacts visitors.
Why meta descriptions are important to you and to your SEO rankings.
How to extract real search value from your meta description.
What Is a Meta Description?
A meta description is an attribute within your meta tags that helps describe your page. This snippet of text may appear in the search engine results under your headline, though sometimes, search engines will pull a snippet of text from the main body copy of the page instead.

You can find the meta description on any web page by right-clicking on the page and selecting "view source" or "view page source":

View your page's meta description by right clicking and selecting "view source".

Once you're looking at the page's code, you'll likely see a meta description tag, which will probably look something like this:

<meta name="description" content="Meta descriptions can have a surprisingly large impact on your search marketing campaigns; find out how..." />
<meta name="keywords" content="meta description,google meta description,meta name description" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />

This information has a few purposes, one of which is to serve as the snippet of text on the SERP when searchers perform a search query that your page ranks for. The meta description should give search engine users a brief description of what they'll find if they click through to your site.