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What Are Meta-Titles & Descriptions and How Should You Use Them?

by | Sep 28, 2016 | SEO

The words meta-title and meta-description generally put people off of ever investigating what these terms actually mean. That sets up a major issue in many businesses marketing strategies. Although the terms sound technical, both serve an extremely important role for how your business appears in search results.

It is important to understand with both terms, that they are similar – but most certainly different. So let’s start with answering three questions;

  1. Where does it appear?
  2. What is the simplest explanation of it?
  3. What does it do or affect?

Meta-Title

meta-title-example-google-results

Where does it appear?
It appears in the search results of Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. It also appears at the top of a web browser in the tab section.

What is the simplest explanation of it?
The Meta-Title is different to your H1 tag. Commonly referred to as your SEO Title, it is usually 50-65 characters.

What does it do or affect?
The meta-title helps Google identify what keywords your article is trying to rank for. It is also crucial for click-through-rates to your website from the search results.

 

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Meta-Description

meta-description-google-results

Where does it appear?
It appears in the search results of all search engines (Google, Bing etc.).

What is the simplest explanation of it?
A meta-description is a 160 character explanation of what your website’s specific page is about.

What does it do or affect?
Contrary to what some believe, it has NO EFFECT on SEO. Its sole purpose is to improve click-through rate to your website from the search results.

How To Make The Most Of Them

It isn’t enough just to know what something is and where it goes – you have to be able to make some lemonade out of those lemons.

When it comes to meta-titles, that means learning how to make the absolute most of your 65 characters. So here are the things your title must-have, should never have, and things that will improve your title:

MUST-Have!

  • A relevant keyword
  • Be at least 50 characters
  • If it’s the title of a page not an article, include more than one keyword
  • Be different than the H1 tag

NEVER Have!

  • A title longer than 65 characters
  • A title that doesn’t make sense
  • A misleading title, ie. one not relevant to the page

Might Help!

  • Start with a number for articles
  • Start your title with a How/Why/What/When to improve click through rates

For meta-descriptions, it is generally a matter of testing. With 160 characters, you simultaneously are able to do a lot and not do much. What I mean by that, is you can’t lay out a beautifully crafted pitch. BUT you can use certain trigger words to incite action.

The Tactics:

First and foremost, when you have a page description there are three ways to design them:

  1. The Auto-Fill – if you do not manually enter a meta-description, it will fill it with an excerpt from the start of your article
  2. The Read More – put an appealing introduction to the article in, and just before the end – put ‘… click to read more!’
  3. The Generic – create a general description of your site/business and use that for all pages

For most sites, you will find auto filling is happening for all pages. At 5Tales, we recommend you do not do that. We believe that it is fine for articles or blog posts, but that the vast majority of pages need either a generic description or a read more call-to-action.

The reason being, articles and blog posts should already have enticing first lines to draw the reader in. Therefore they almost always work perfectly as a meta-description. Whereas if it is your homepage, that auto-filled text could be a FAQ, a value prop or another set of sales copy.

Using Generic descriptions can be fantastic. This could be a simple description of your business, or some general copy to try and improve CTR. Company after company has had success with this method, and in most cases, it will suffice.

Read More descriptions are another method of describing your page. The greatest level of success we have found with these kinds of meta-descriptions comes from adding them to sales pages, content or services pages or even adjusting our article descriptions to have this included.

Final Takeaways

  • Meta-Titles are 50-65 character versions of your H1 tag
    • They shoulder the load of having both SEO and click-through rate implications
  • Meta-Descriptions are a 160 character description of your webpage
    • These have no SEO value and are exlcusively for improving click-through rates from search results to your webpage

 

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