How To Write Meta Descriptions

Google itself has provided a very concise set of general guidelines for drafting snippets or meta
descriptions for pages. You’ll notice that these are all pretty broad — no mention of character or
pixel-based display limitations, worrying about desktop vs mobile, or even, remarkably for
Google, a warning against using some form of automation to generate this element at scale.

Google’s guidelines for meta descriptions are:

Give every page a meta description — that is, don’t skip this step, and do actually craft metas;

Make every page’s meta description unique — don’t copy + paste the same thing on every page;
Make meta descriptions relevant to the page — in other words, make sure the description does
describe the page, in simple, descriptive terms.
Automate meta descriptions using page data — or do what Google does for your own pages:
scrape the content and use that to ensure that all metas are unique and, by virtue of coming from
the page itself, unique to the page. This point is optional, depending on the nature of your site
and your resources.
If you follow that link above, you’ll see Google’s list includes five points rather than my four.
That’s because Google, as always, emphasizes quality in their guidelines, and distinguishes
“relevant” from “high quality”. This kind of repetition when it comes to “quality” is classic Google,
but if you aren’t writing something relevant to a page you are trying to optimize, then what does
quality even mean?