The good and bad examples Chris analyses are still on point and you would do worse than to write your own descriptions according to his takeaway checklist even two years down the line...
Good examples elaborate on the information given in the title tag and aim to entice the searcher to click through.
The above example SERPs include description for Netmums being truncated at around 330 characters, and shorter descriptions more in keeping with the classic 135-160 character length..
We can also infer from this that Google's algorithm is judging the usefulness of the description choosing to include more if it's to answer the query of the searcher quickly..
Both of the longest meta descriptions from SERPs are kept at the length on mobile..
if the description includes relevant key phrases or is doing job at answering the query, Google is happy to include longer snippets even on mobile..
Interestingly, for all the functionality of SERPs, the humble meta description is still incredibly important.
In fact, with Google's willingness to present longer descriptions we could even argue that well-crafted 300 character descriptions could improve visibility and CTRs..
The trick is getting the balance right with ensuring your markup is alerting the search spiders to the information on your page and ensuring that your meta description is useful to your reader..
To help bring you up to speed, we've produced updated guide for 2018, focusing on clearing up some of the confusion around HTML meta tags and meta tags, and listing some of the more useful tags you can use on your site to help search engines understand your site better...
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