You add a meta description by inserting a meta tag in the HTML head section of your page. The code looks like this: <meta name="description" content="Your concise page summary goes here">. If you're hand-coding HTML, place it between the opening <head> and closing </head> tags, ideally near the title tag. Most sites today run on a CMS, which means you never see raw HTML. WordPress with Yoast SEO or Rank Math gives you a "Meta Description" box below the post editor. Shopify has it under "Search engine listing preview" when editing a product or page. Webflow, Squarespace, and Wix all have similar SEO panels. You type your description there, hit save, and the platform writes the tag for you. Keep the description between 150 and 160 characters. Google truncates around 155–160 on desktop, sometimes slightly longer on mobile. Write it like ad copy: include your primary keyword naturally, communicate the page's value, and add a reason to click. Generic descriptions like "Learn more about our services" waste the snippet real estate. Google doesn't use meta descriptions as a ranking factor, but they directly influence click-through rate from search results. A compelling description can lift CTR by 20–40 percent compared to a bland one, and higher CTR signals relevance over time. That said, Google rewrites roughly 60 percent of descriptions when it thinks it found a better snippet from your page content. You still write one because when Google does use it, you control the message. At Ottawa SEO, we write unique descriptions for every important page in our 500-plus domain portfolio. For thin or low-priority pages, we let Google pull from the content rather than force a mediocre boilerplate description. If you're managing hundreds of product pages, template-based descriptions with dynamic variables—like product name and category—are acceptable as long as they stay unique and relevant per page.