Why is this important?
This is important for SEO purposes as metadata descriptions are often used as a descriptive text in search engines. It can also assist web page indexing by public and internal search engines. The <meta> tag provides metadata about the HTML document. Metadata will not be displayed on the page, but will be machine parsable. Meta elements are typically used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata.The metadata can be used by browsers (how to display content or reload page), search engines (keywords), or other web services. Meta descriptions provide a short description of a page, and are displayed below page titles in search results and shared links in Facebook.
The meta description usually appears below the title, with keywords from the user's search phrase in bold.The description should give users a reason to click - a description that says "Under construction" is unlikely to get many clicks. Use language that people actually use in searches rather than corporate jargon, because this means more text is bolded to attract attention which increases the number of clicks. Not used directly by screen readers, but will be read out as part of search results pages returned by Google and Bing.
How can I resolve this issue?
The following tag needs to be added to the <head> section on each of your websites pages
<meta name="description" content="Your text goes here">
If you do not have access to this section of your website you may need to reach out to your IT or web development team to know how this can be added.
What topics do this checkpoint affect?
Can you explain how this checkpoint works?
The checkpoint looks for the following line of code inside the head tag of the source code of the page, if this line of code does not exist or has no content then it will be reported as an error.
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