Should the meta description be the same as the page title?

meta descriptions and titles of pages

[amythepoet]

HI,

Just checking to see if the meta description should also be the title of the page.

Thanks :)

[tedster]

Not usually. If you look at a search engine result, the title is often the link that you click on, and the meta description (or part of it) can be the text below the link. So the meta description works best when it is a more extended sentence describing the page it belongs to -- even a stronger marketing message as long as it describes the page well.

[amythepoet]

Yes, o.k., that's what I thought.

This is some process, fixing up the pages, I hope it's worth it and when I do fix up the meta descriptions, how does it take for any noticeable change to occur?

[tedster]

Depends on how often the search engines crawl the site. Sometimes days, or weeks or even more. Especially with the recent crawler changes at Google, that particular search engine is difficult to predict right now.

[amythepoet]

Oh ok, well I'm fixing thank you