Last month, Google changed its guidelines for how long your meta descriptions should be from approximately 160 characters to a maximum of 320 characters. This is a big change for your WordPress website!

Having a longer meta description might help your site have more real-estate or visibility in search results, especially if your competitors have not updated their meta descriptions.

Meta descriptions don’t help with rankings but do impact whether people are enticed to click through to your website.
Google may or may not show your entire meta description in search results, and it may not show it at all, preferring to show content from your page. Google decides what to show based on the search query and what’s on your page.

So what should you do?

I suggest you adjust each of the major web pages with a longer more descriptive and focused description. Ask me if you would like any help doing this to your WordPress website.

Brendan Proctor

22 Years of experience in UI web design & front end development. Designing, developing & promoting websites for all kinds of businesses in the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa. Spends his week days buried in responsive web site design & front end development making the most of CSS & Javascript.

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