There are without doubt best practices when it comes to writing a good page titles and descriptions but thinking about it in a way that is too “scientific” can often end up in a page title that is meaningless for the reader, hence the title of this blog post.
Writing a page title for SEO
First, here is a quick recap of what a page title is.
- It appears at the top of the browser, like this:
(Individual browsers will display the page title slightly differently, in some browsers you can see the whole page title and in others you can only see part of it)
- The page title looks like this in the search results:
Lets take the example of my last blog, 5 tips to kick start your local SEO.
In a world where I was writing this page title purely for the search engine, I probably would have written it something like this:
Local SEO tips | Local search engine optimisation | SEO
But of course that is not the world we live in, the search engine will not become your customer so why write just for them?
And, what is the point in getting your site to page one if no one actually ever clicks through to your site? The number one rule of writing page titles is to write a title that people want to click on.
I am definitely not saying you should abandon keywords for your page titles, just simply that you should think about how to use them so that the page title benefits the user.
Here is a quick checklist for writing page titles:
- Does it include keywords?
- Does it accurately reflect what the user will find on the page?
- Is it clickable? i.e. is it written to make the user want to click through to your site?
- Is it less than 65 characters?
- Is it unique? i.e. it should be different from all of the other page titles on your site.
If you have answered yes to all of these questions then you are good to go!
Quick tip: If you need to break your page titles up into sections, use a pipe: |
Writing a meta description for SEO
What is a meta description?
As a website user, we don’t see the meta description anywhere on the webpage itself but where we do see it is in the search results before we click through to the page.
- This is the meta description:
While doing a little research before writing this blog I came across an article that stated that the meta description has no effect on SEO and I have to say that I disagree with this.
While it’s true that Google doesn’t consider your page description when deciding where to serve it up in the search results, it is not accurate to say that the description it has no effect.
The meta description can have a direct effect on whether a searcher chooses to click through to your site. If your result has a low click through rate, that sends a message to the search engine that your page may not be as relevant as it initially thought and you might find that your ranking position starts to deteriorate.
Writing a good meta description should take into consideration what the page is about and what the key reason is that someone would want to click through.
The meta description, like the page title, must accurately reflect what the page is about. This is because when a searcher arrives on your page you want them to stay right? Which is more likely to happen if the page they land on is how it was described to them.
Including a call to action in the meta description is a good way of improving the click through rate of your search result.
Here is a quick checklist for writing meta descriptions:
- Does it include keywords?
- Does it accurately reflect what the user will find on the page?
- Is it clickable? i.e. is it written to make the user want to click through to your site?
- Is it less than 156 characters?
- Is it unique? i.e. it should be different from all of the other page titles on your site.
- Does it include a call to action?
The number one item on Google’s “Ten things we know to be true” is ‘Focus on the user, all else will follow’ and this is the philosophy I recommend following when writing metadata. Write first and foremost for the person that is reading it, not for the robot.
