Meta Monday: Descriptions
I occasionally have questions about posting on the web, and Bear Blog specifically, so I thought I'd use not-quite-clever alliteration and ask these questions on Mondays.
First up: Does anyone use Meta Descriptions? I did, in my first few posts, but overall I haven't been dropping that field in the meta area for new posts.
What's the purpose for the meta_description tag anyway? Is it like a summary for your RSS feed? In my experience the feed shows the entire post anyway, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
Well let's see, this is what Bear's documentation says:
optional (default: first 160 characters of content)
This is the description of the blog that shows up in search engines or when links are shared in messenger apps or social media. If no meta description is set, it will default to the first 160 characters of the content of the homepage.
I'm going to experiment with this but I can't say I've noticed it show up when sharing on social media.
If you use meta_description, or know its true purpose, please let me know.