Writing Meta Descriptions That Earn Clicks

Nano CMS generates all the technical SEO tags for you, but one of them is yours to write well: the meta description. It's the grey text under your title in Google, and it's effectively free ad copy.

What good looks like

• Aim for ~150 characters. Much longer and Google truncates it.
• Lead with the benefit or answer, not a preamble. Tell the reader what they'll get.
• Make it unique per post. Duplicated descriptions across posts weaken all of them.
• Match the search intent of the post's topic - use the words people actually search.

Where it goes

It's the description field in the editor, with a live character counter. Nano CMS uses it in three places automatically: the <meta name="description"> tag, the Open Graph/Twitter preview, and the RSS feed item.

The title earns the impression; the description earns the click.

It also doubles as the fallback summary on category cards, so it's worth a minute of thought on every post.