[Updated Nov 1, 2016]
“How do you write great title tags and meta descriptions?” That is the question that clients ask me most frequently. And it’s a complicated question, for sure! There are several components to writing great titles and descriptions, but there are also a few specifications that each company will want to consider for themselves.
Where are those title tags? Find them in the tab of your browser.
I’ll address the considerations first. The goal is to write title tags that are Google-bot-pleasing, but you also want to have titles and descriptions that are functional and helpful to the human visitors to your website. This can be tricky when the approach is different when thinking of writing for bots versus humans. My best advice: somewhere right in the middle is your best bet! Write naturally and use the same voice that you are using in your page content, but include keyword phrases that are specific to the page.
Title tags must fall in a range of characters, but also need to fall into a size range to appear complete in Google search. This size range has to do with the number of pixels that a title tag takes up on the page. For example, if you’ve got a title tag with a couple of w’s in it, that will take up far more space than a title with several lower case l’s and i’s. Just look at this spacing difference: www lil. The three skinnier letters take up about as much space as one of the w’s! Why does this matter? Well, in Google search results, you are allotted a specific amount of space for the title of your page. This went into effect in early 2014 when Google updated its search results page. There was another update to the format of Google’s search results in 2016. Now, search results have a bit more space on the page. Yay, but, wait, there are also some other things to consider: like how many words you use, where the break might show up in those words (if you use too many) and the fact that Google is now appending the brand name to the end of the title tag in some cases. You want your page titles to appear complete in the results, while getting you the most out of this limited function. Unfortunately, this all makes it really tricky to say that there is a specific number of characters that you should use for each title tag. Around 52-55 characters is probably a pretty safe bet, but if you think you might be using a lot of wide characters (or if you test and find that Google is appending your brand name to every title), choose to use a few less letters.
The meta description appears in search results, it’s that black text below the (green) website address.
Meta descriptions also have a size range that you want to target for full effect in Google search results. Meta descriptions are not used in Google’s algorithm, but a good meta description raises your organic click-through-rate. Google can tell human searchers are clicking through to your site, and likely takes that into account with your ranking. Google also does see short or duplicate meta descriptions as a site quality issue – so I guess it is indeed part of their overall formula. Recently, Google has made some changes to how they display descriptions and in some cases, they are chopping up your beautiful descriptions and taking bits and pieces of your content and adding that to the description so that they can highlight more of the search terms a user typed into the search bar. In addition, Google will sometimes add a date to the beginning or end of the description field in search results. Considering all of this, however, I still recommend meta descriptions of between 139 and 156 characters. The seem to work best, no matter what Google decides to do with them. Again, strive to convey your message to human visitors with your natural writing style, but include those keyword targets specific to the page. When writing meta descriptions, entice users to click on your search engine result by listing benefits and a call to action. In addition, the meta description should be different for each page of your website.
I have written a plethora of title tags and meta descriptions for a wide range of clients and what I’ve learned is that if you are organized and set up systems, even the largest websites can have all new titles and descriptions before you know it. I recommend setting up a spreadsheet and setting columns for old titles, new titles, character count, old description, new description and character count. Once you get used to using the spreadsheet, you can set the width of the columns to help guide you to the right size while you are writing.
If you are still feeling overwhelmed about getting your titles and descriptions in order, just give me a call. I’ve just about got it down to an art and I’ve also got a few tools in my tool belt that can automate some of the process that may be bogging you down. I’m here to help! Questions? Shoot me an email or a message at @jannavance on Twitter. Good luck!