Once you’ve created your meta description and are ready to upload it to your WordPress website, all you have to do is install a plugin, like the All in One SEO or the Yoast SEO plugin. These plugins will take you through a step-by-step guide on how to upload your meta descriptions. There are lots of plugins available that will make the process easy to do.

They do not have any direct impact on your SEO, meaning your ranking will remain unaffected. However, this doesn’t mean they are any less important. Google and SEO experts alike recommend you still take care and attention when creating them, as it will impact your click-through rates, which can, in turn, help your content to rank higher eventually.

They matter a lot if you want to compete well online, attract more customers, and boost brand awareness. These meta descriptions convince search users that you have the information, product, or service they need over anyone else.

If you include any of the keywords that the users have searched for, they will appear bold in your meta description. Although this doesn’t have any impact on your SEO, unlike when included in the content on your website, this allows you to stand out more on the search results pages, where everyone is battling hard to be seen. Therefore, you should absolutely include relevant keywords in your meta description. These must also make sense for the content the URL takes them to.

If you don’t create your own meta descriptions and instead leave them blank, Google will take it into its own hands automatically, using a snippet from your content for it instead. If you know that you have lots of meta descriptions to write or that there are too many pages to write meta descriptions for, make sure you fully optimise the very first paragraphs of these pages, making them concise and good summaries of what the content is to provide for the user.

Best practices should see you creating your meta descriptions rather than leaving it up to Google. However, if you have lots of pages or too many for your small team to get through straightaway, leaning on Google until you get around to creating your own can be sensible. Aim to write as many of your meta descriptions yourself as you are best positioned to describe your content in a way that will attract users.

Despite writing a meta description, there is no guarantee that this or your title tag will actually show up. Creating one doesn’t mean Google is obligated to use it. They are considered to be more like suggestions for what to display on the search results pages. Google wants to provide the best results to its users, and sometimes, this means shifting around and changing some vital keywords so that they appear more relevant.