KEYWORD AT START OF TITLE TAG – GOOGLE RANKING FACTOR?

Here’s what Yoast recommends as far as meta descriptions go:

• Limit the Meta Description to 155 characters.
• Use your focus keyword in the Meta Description.
• Make sure the Meta Description matches the content of the page.

In a video published on the Google Search Central channel in August 2020, Google’s Search Advocate Martin Splitt said of meta descriptions:

“Please don’t forget to add them to your mobile pages. They matter a lot for Googlebot, as well.”

A widely-held belief among SEO pros is that Meta Descriptions lost ranking value a long time ago.

“Most of us know that while the search engines no longer consider the meta description in their ranking factors, this element of your page is still important in getting traffic to your site.” (Ann Donnelly 2011)

After all this time does Google actually use meta descriptions as a ranking factor?

Most likely, No.

Matt Cutts explained in 2009 why meta keywords were removed from the algorithm sheds some light on their thinking around meta descriptions at the time, as well:

“About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called ‘off-page’ factors such as the links pointing to a web page.

…Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.”

Even today, the meta description you assigned to that page might not appear in search results.

Google often replaces whatever you put in the Meta Description with (two-thirds of cases) content from the first paragraph on the page to populate the search snippet.

So, it does NOT matter to SEO.