I have a site which has just external news links, I also have a few sentences to describe the page. What is a good position for the page description in terms of UX and bots perspective?
These are the two options I can consider:
Another thing to consider also is that, it is a responsive layout which means the sidebar goes right to the bottom on smaller screens.
From a Google point of view, you want your content above the fold (before users need to scroll):
As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change.
https://search.googleblog.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html
Although this Google update was targeting sites with adds above the fold, the wording above seems to give the impression that any sites with any content not appearing before a scroll may be affected.
If having just a h1 and a bunch of links pushed any content below the fold, I would go for the first option.
You could also do A/B testing with different layoutd to see which results in the best UX
