Why Do Website Titles and Meta Descriptions Matter for SEO?

Website titles and page descriptions are your potential audience’s first point of call when viewing your online brand. The quality of your of titles and descriptions makes all the difference to whether they click on your website or not. Bad ones will make them look elsewhere. Acting as a short summary, internet users will view your web page title and description first. Based on this, they will decide whether you will provide them with the information they’re looking for.

These small attributes make a big difference to your website’s SEO (search engine optimisation) campaign and can determine how much traffic you garner. Knowing exactly how to write them is essential.

Be My Social have an expert SEO team in Doncaster. We specialise in optimising your website and helping you rank higher on Google’s search options. Want to know more about why SEO is such an important asset to your brand’s success? Read our article below to get a clearer idea of how we can help you.

Creating a Good Webpage Title for SEO in Doncaster

Website titles are incredibly important for encouraging interaction with your webpage. Some people may decide to check out your site purely based on your website title. Google can use dynamic meta tags to either lengthen or shorten your webpage title depending on the search term. A few ideas for good website titles practice are:

Keep it under around 60 characters.
Avoid using all caps. It can appear jarring and offputting.
Don’t overwhelm your title with keywords. Keywords refer to the popular words that people search concerning a topic, and can improve your Google ranking if dispersed correctly. Overwhelming a post with keywords is known as “keyword stuffing,” and Google can downrank you.
Make it relevant to the page’s content.
Establish your brand in the title. For example, are you a furniture company? Make sure that that’s clear!

Creating SEO-centred Meta Descriptions

The small bit of text below your title on Google is known as a meta description. This provides viewers with a little window into the web page, and builds upon the title. One of the main attributes your description should have is keywords, which boosts its SEO and Google ranking.

If you need help optimising your appearance on Google’s ranking, we can help. Our specialist Doncaster team provides bespoke web design and SEO in Doncaster and across the country. Find out more about what we do here.

The Basics of SEO

A few things you need to know to achieve the best SEO practice for your webpage description are:

Write compelling advertising copy. Your meta description draws readers to your website, so it is important that it is straight to the point and gives them exactly the information that they want. Creating an easy-to-read, informative description utilising keywords can drastically improve your sites click-through rate on search engine results pages. Google will make keywords in descriptions appear bold when they match someone’s search request, so it’s important to use possible search terms as your keyphrases to draw attention
Avoid duplicate tags. As with your webpage title, it’s important that meta descriptions on each of your website pages be different from each other. Otherwise, you’ll end up with search engine results pages that look repetitive and unattractive. To avoid creating duplicate meta descriptions, try to create a unique script for each page, all the while sticking to your brand. For example, your description for your homepage will concern exactly what your website is about, but your description for the contact page will be similar, but will make it clear that your readers can contact you through this page.
Try to avoid quotation marks. When Google sees double quotation marks in your meta description, it usually cuts off the text from where they appear. If quotation marks are necessary for the context of your meta description, you can use an HTML entity to stop automatic shortening.

When NOT To Write a Meta Description

It may seem like common knowledge for those creating an effective SEO campaign to write a compelling meta description, but they aren’t always necessary. Deciding whether to implement your own webpage description or not all depends on:

If a page is choosing between a couple of heavily searched terms, write your meta description including popular terms and target keywords for those users who are searching for queries.
If the page has three or more keyphrases or words, it’s usually easier to let search engines create a meta description themselves, because they always display the keywords and related terms that someone has searched for.
HOWEVER – When it comes to social media sites such as Facebook when the page is shared on their site, they often use the meta description as the default description. In the absence of a meta description, sites will usually display the first text on the page that they can find. If the first bit of text on your page isn’t all that engaging or appealing, it might not create a good user experience. Not just for you, but for individuals coming into contact with your webpages via social media.

In Conclusion

We hope that our article has highlighted the importance of website titles and meta descriptions in SEO campaigns. Here at Be My Social, we don’t just provide companies with SEO services in Doncaster. We operate across the UK to ensure that web pages make their way up Google’s search ranking. We utilise keywords not just in the title and description, but in the content of the website too.

To find out more about how we can help out your SEO Doncaster performance, get in touch. You can do this by filling out our online form. Alternatively, you can call us on 01302 315 077. You should also follow us on social media!