Meta title and description tags are how your website appears in the list of rankings in a search engine.
This text can be edited on the individual pages of a website to introduce a page, tell Google what your page is about, and convince users to click on you.
Users click your title to load the page, or they can select ‘more’, which is sometimes an option when the meta description runs long.
Meta titles and descriptions should include your keyword, preferably sooner rather than later.
Your page should be tailored around this keyword too, with the phrase mentioned throughout headings and content to target people searching this keyword.
You have a limited space to write your tags, and the best approach is to mention the following with hyphens to separate them:
Title-
Description-
Yes, too short, and you’re not taking advantage enough of the space you have to explain your page and rank for keywords.
However, too long and not concise enough is overcomplicating the main message.
Ideal lengths are:
Title: 55-65 characters
Description: 160 characters
As one of the main best practices in SEO, your meta tags can make all the difference when it comes to ranking on Google.
If you tailor your meta information around user searches and high search volume keywords, you’re more likely to show in the first few results.
It’s becoming all the more important that your meta tags reflect user searches, with AI Overviews replacing traditional.
Duplicate Meta Title and Description
If you replicate a page or have two pages targeting the same keyword, then audits flag this as duplicate title tags.
This confuses Google as it’s conflicted about which page to lead users to, therefore hindering where your page ranks overall.
To avoid this, every page on your website should target different keywords and have alternative metas.
Depending on the SEO Plugin your website is using, you can set all pages, blogs or products to pull through the title of the page so it’s mentioned in the title and description.
This is useful for large websites that have lots of products, pages and articles that would otherwise take a long time to manually write.
See image below for an idea of how to set settings in Yoast….
With our SEO services, your content will be refined around the best keywords based on research, industry knowledge and competitor research.
We tweak your meta tags if they’re not working to rank your page higher and try something knew, often with trial and error until we see better results.
Want a free consultation to talk SEO and ranking better on Google? Get in touch today.