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When it comes to optimizing websites for the search engines, not only do you need to consider the information on your web pages that people will click through to, but also how you present those pages in the search engines to encourage surfers to click on your site listing in the results rather than on another listing.
To do this, you need to consider how you write your title tags and meta description tags on each of your web pages. Search engines typically use the title tag as the clickable link in search results, and the meta description tag as the information or description that sits below the title tag. This information needs to be written objectively to encourage click throughs to your website.
The title tag is about 70 characters long and needs to be a short descriptive phrase of the web page containing important keywords. The meta description tag is about 250 characters long and is a longer objective description of the page the visitor will click through to. You can also include keywords within the description but your meta description tag won’t actually influence rankings, whereas the title tag will.
If you use a content management system that automates the title tags and descriptions for you, make sure these tags actually make sense and represent your web pages accurately. There are a few myths about writing title and meta tags, for example that the title tag must be the same as headings on the page – this is not true, you can tailor your title tag how you want so it makes sense to searchers. I’ve also heard that the meta description tag should be the same as the first sentence of text on your web page. Again, this may not make sense to surfers. I tend to take some text from the web page and then adjust it into a nice description of the page. If you sell products online, you may also want to include the products price in your meta description tag – this can help to pre-qualify visitors to your website.
There is no set formula for writing title and meta description tags and at the end of the day, you need to satisfy potential visitors’ needs to encourage them to click on your listing. Automated descriptions may be necessary for very large sites, but if the way you present your site in the search engines doesn’t make sense to visitors, you can’t expect them to want to click on your listing – most of us sell to humans, not to search engine robots!
You can find out more about meta descriptions in Google’s Webmaster Central.
I agree. I would further summarise that as a rule of thumb, the page title is for Google to find your page, i.e should have the relevant keywords. The description should make the user to click onto your site from the search results.
Thanks for your comment Johanna. Yes, the title tag is particularly important as a ranking factor and the keywords you target on a particular web page need to be included in it, but written as a meaningful phrase rather than just listing keywords. Hopefully the two tags combined will encourage people to click on your link in the search results!