"Stuff your keyword in the meta description for rankings."

"Stuff your keyword in the meta description for rankings."

Sorry.

The meta description hasn't been a ranking factor since 2009. Google said so on record. Cramming "best cheap running shoes" three times into 155 characters buys you exactly nothing in the algorithm.

Here's what actually happens: the description's only job is the click. A bolded keyword match (Google bolds query terms in the snippet) can lift click-through, sure — but only because it signals relevance to a human eyeball, not because a crawler scored it.

And Google rewrites the description on roughly two-thirds of results anyway, pulling whatever on-page text matches the query. So write it for the human who's deciding whether to click, treat it as ad copy, and stop pretending it moves the ranking needle. It doesn't.

(If you have no description, Google invents one. Often a better one than yours.)