Meta descriptions
Every page you want found through search should carry a short written summary of itself, which search engines can show beneath its link in their results. Silktide reports pages that do not have one.
A is set with an invisible tag in the page's header:
<!-- A specific, useful summary of the page -->
<meta name="description" content="Compare our support plans, response times, and pricing for teams of every size.">
Why this matters
The description is your pitch in search results: one or two sentences that persuade someone to click your page rather than the one above or below it. Without one, search engines improvise a snippet from whatever page text seems relevant, which is often mid-sentence navigation text or boilerplate - accurate enough to display, but rarely persuasive.
Well-written descriptions consistently improve click-through rates, especially for landing pages and other pages that compete for attention in search.
How to fix it
- Write a description of 60 to 160 characters summarizing what the page offers and why it is worth clicking. Write for the searcher, not for keywords.
- Add it in your - most have a "meta description" or "search description" field per page, often provided by an SEO plugin.
- Make each description unique. Duplicating one sitewide is barely better than none, because it tells searchers nothing about the specific page.
- Prioritise the pages people actually reach from search; for genuinely unimportant pages you can the finding.
How Silktide tests this
- Read the page's
<meta name="description">tag. - Skip pages set to , since they do not appear in search results.
- Flag the page if the description is missing or empty.
The length of existing descriptions is tested separately - see Meta descriptions too long and Short meta descriptions.
Troubleshooting
Google shows different text than my description
That is normal. Search engines treat the description as a suggestion and may substitute page text they consider more relevant to the query. A good description is still worth writing: it is used often, and it is the text most other services show when the page is shared.