How to include search descriptions for all blogger posts

Understand Search Descriptions

Search description is nothing but a short and quick description, an overview of your post or web page. In fact; it acts as a first impression and thus helps the users in selecting the most relevant website/blog; while they search the web (by typing keywords in the search bar). Below is shown an example with search description in it. Google call this as 'snippets'. This is an important consideration in SEO strategy. Based on your post description, new users get an overview of your blog/website, know about your site content quickly and hence there is a greater chance of visiting your site.  

By default; Google displays some description of every post in search results by taking some random lines from that post, based on the keyword entered in search bar (just like the one shown below). But this kind is only of little advantage and we cannot expect many pageviews.

But writing a more meaningful 'Search description' will help the bloggers include some keywords in it so that users (as well as search engine crawlers !) gets attracted, thus making them visit your site. Let us see step by step procedure on how to enable it for every single post in blogger.

Step - 1

Enabling Meta Tags :

Login to your blogspot account and goto settings > search preference located at the left of the page. Scroll to the top and see the option 'Description' under 'Meta tags'. click 'edit' to get the view as shown in step - 2 picture. 

Step - 2

Click 'Enable search description > yes'. By checking yes, you are authorizing blogger to display search description in individual posts. Remember without enabling this 'Meta tags' option, you won't see 'seach description' in posts ! so, this step is must.

Step - 3

You may type a short description of your blog (in 150 words) in the space given like I did in the above picture. Remember this is just a description for the whole blog and not for individual post. You need to write separate description for each individual posts for better results.

Step - 4

OK, after doing this, go to any of your post and click edit. Then see the post settings tab on the right of the page as shown below. Under that you will now see options like labels, search description etc. Click Search descriptions and then write something about your post. Click 'Done' and that's it, you have successfully given a description to your post. You may also include some Labels (like I showed in picture) that are mostly related to your post content for better optimization results. Labels are also key for better indexing.

What is best to include in Search Description ?

• An overview of your post
• Descent keywords (no flooding !)
• Preferrably, a complete sentense
• We can also include blog's home URL
• At times; blog's title can be rearranged and included

Just wait, one more thing to note !, Remember the description option which appears under Settings > Basic > Description as shown in the below picture is for short display about your blog in the blog page (shown in below picture). I mean, this actually appears in your blog page (as well as in search results !), but the search description what we discussed above won't appear in blog but will only appear in search results.  

Finally, as an additional information, you may check this video about 'snippets' discussed by Matt cutts in Google YouTube.

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