I'm trying to come up with a description for the meta description tag on the index page

Marketing
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Hello,
I’m not sure if this is the right section for my question. I searched for something specific to SEO, but the other section related to SEO was for WordPress, so I decided to post here.

I have a personal website that serves more as a blog where I share some ideas about Linux and Emacs in general. These are the main topics I write about, but I sometimes include off-topic content, like music or anything else I find interesting. It’s not an expert information blog, it’s just my personal ideas. I was thinking of using this meta description for the Index page and would appreciate your feedback on whether it would be good from a SEO standpoint:

 <meta name="description"
       content="A personal website focused on technology, Linux, Emacs, and a variety of other topics.">

I haven’t used the first person singular. I think this is the description that will appear when my name is searched on Google, the domain being my full name.

I would appreciate any suggestions. Thank you!

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Hi, it sounds good to me, but I am not much into my SEO. However, what I would do is to use ChatGPT. You can feed it your page content, give it a list of the topics you cover on your blog and ask it to generate the meta description for you (or 5 if you want to compare). Then you can discuss with it whether what it generated follows best practices, what the best practices are, if it even makes sense to use a meta name="description" tag etc. GPT3 is free to use, all you need is an account.

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BTW, if you do use Chat, I would be interested to hear what it recommended as the final meta tag.

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Thank you for your response. I used GPT in my initial post, so that was the suggested recommendation. However, I wanted to ask for feedback since I don’t fully trust AI-generated content. That said, I think the text works well as a general description, so I went with it for now.

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Ah ok. Got it.

So in that case, the meta description sounds fine to me (also as a native speaker). When generating the meta tags for SitePoint articles, while that wasn’t my responsibility directly, we always looked to make sure that they give a good description of the page content while including relevant keywords. I think there is also a max length to be aware of, right? (before the content gets truncated).

That said, I just did some checking and it seems that Google doesn’t always use this tag to generate the search result snippet.

Google will sometimes use the tag from a page to generate a snippet in search results, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content.

I also found these guidelines by Google, which you have probably seen, but might be worth a read if not: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet#meta-descriptions

Also, would you mind posting a link to your blog? I’d be interested to see what kind of Linux content you have.

Yup. That is what should happen.

Anyway, TL;DR: Nice description. You’ll be fine.