SEO titles and descriptions; all you need to know
If you’re a business owner that has their own website, I’m sure you’ve already come across SEO titles and descriptions. You may have already given it a go at writing your own for your website. This article will cover all you need to know about your SEO titles and descriptions and exactly how to easily write the best possible meta information for your business website and therefore attribute to a healthy search engine ranking.
What are they?
Title tags and descriptions are the headline and summary that appear on search results and tells browsers and users what your web page is all about. They are not seen by the user other than at the top of your browser (try hovering over any browser tab you have open - you will see the meta title for the page you are on!)
Why do we use them?
Both titles and descriptions are important for your search engine ranking. Why? Browsers use this meta information to define what your web page is about and uses the keywords you have mentioned to show your web page to people that are searching in their search engine. As search engines rely on this information to know what the purpose of the web page is... it’s one of the most important keyword implementation you can do for your web page.
A wee bit of history
Back in the day (in the 90s), there weren’t just titles and descriptions hidden in the head of your website’s HTML document, but also a tag called “keywords,” and people would stuff 10 to 50 keywords in here to tell browsers to show my website to people when they type in these words. Quickly this became problematic: reliability - people where stuffing these areas full of keywords that weren’t relevant to the website itself to attract as many users as possible, now browsers have a job - filter down all the content in the massive world wide web and show me exactly what I’m searching for.. if browsers relied on the random keywords us average joe humans were using, they essentially where doing a crap job. So meta information and SEO in general became more complicated and a lot more intelligent.
Ok - so how do I write my meta information?
There are some key rules to stick to when writing your meta information. Stick to these and you’ll be fine.
Write a unique title and description for every page on your website.
Make sure both are the correct character length as advised by internet browsers. Below is a handy link for you to check you are within the threshold:
https://totheweb.com/learning_center/tool-test-google-title-meta-description-lengths/
Include relevant keywords and long tail keyword phrases within both the title and descriptions - DO NOT STUFF. As I mentioned before, browsers are pretty darn intelligent these days, they can see if you’re stuffing as many keywords in willy-nilly.
Following on from the point above - make sure you are writing in full legible sentences. Internet users will read your meta information when they are searching on the internet, you want to entice people into clicking on you’re site not completely confuse them. Browsers can tell if you’re making any sense so keep it natural, keep it human.
Titles tags have a larger impact on your SEO ranking than descriptions so make sure you put the most important words within the first 2 -3 words of the headline.
Need some inspiration? (warning - slightly nitty gritty)
Easy peasy. Pop to your favourite browser and type in a keyword phrase for your business. Scroll past the ads and find a search result that seems to mirror your business. Now straight away you can see the title and probably most of the description they have written. But what if we want to be even more nosey and check out all of their meta information? I’ve got a little hack for you...
1 - Click on the search result you found.
2 - Now the homepage has loaded I want you to → Right click → Click on ‘Inspect’.
3 - You’ve now opened what’s called “Google Dev Tools,” which is essentially a fabulous tool for developers to troubleshoot their websites straight from the browser. But it is also a great way to sneak a peek into the HTML infrastructure of any website on the browser.
4 - So scroll up to the top of the Chrome dev tools and the only part you want to be worried about the tags that say ‘head’.
5 - Click on the little > to open up the information that’s stored in the head (spoiler alert - this is where you will see this web pages meta information)
6 - and Voila!
SEO titles and descriptions are super important for a healthy search engine ranking and to entice users to click on your website. So make sure to spend a couple of hours optimising the meta information on your website - this part of on-site SEO is 100% something you can do yourself as a business owner.
If you have any questions or got a little confused at any point, always feel comfortable to give me a shout and I’ll see how I can help.
