Onsite SEO

Basics about title and meta description tags

Section: Onsite

Title tags are one of the most relevant aspects of all that comprise onsite optimisation. Search engine spiders use these title tags as the main source for determining the page topic. Spiders or crawlers examine the title and then translate the topic of the page. Probably the title tag is the most important sentence that you will write for your main page of your website.

A Page Title plays the role of giving your potential clients the first impression about your business, helping them understand what your page is about. Meta descriptions will be the first piece of information to display your website's unique sales proposition that an online searcher will see when they search for something that your business has to offer. It is clever to keep your customers at the front of your mind when building your site, making your title enticing, so it reads like an advertisement and gets them interested when they see your business in the search engine results.

Your keywords should be in your Meta descriptions and title tags, and each one in every page on your site should be unique. It is normally recommended to target 1 or 2 specific keywords or phrases for each page, as there is always the risk that over optimising will most likely cause your users to run away to the next result they see that fits their needs.

Meta description tags are also critical to attracting relevant traffic to your site. The title tag, which accompanies the description tag, cannot always effectively communicate what your company does, as its main purpose is different to that of the meta description. The title tag needs to include all of the keywords targeted on that page, within that limited space, so this means that there is little room for any type of company description. This is why the description tag is so important.

The fundamentals of SEO apply regardless of which search engine you want to rank in, but each of the major ones has some particularities. When it comes to the amount of characters displayed in your titles, each browser sets their own limits:

Google

Google's Guidelines don't include a hard limit on the length of your <title> tag.  Google typically displays around 65 to 70 characters and that includes spacing for title tags and shows 156 Characters (including spaces) for Meta Description.

Yahoo

Yahoo shows up to 72 Characters (including Spaces) for a Page Title. (PDF’s up to 75 characters) and up to 161 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description.

Bing

Bing shows 65 Characters (Including Spaces) for a Page Title Tag and up to 150 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description Tag.

Some experts suggest that title tags can be longer and breach those limits because if is true that only the aforementioned elements will be shown at the top bar of the browser, still search engine spiders will read the rest of those tags and take it into account when indexing your content.

So as search engines maintain their algorithms secret, and most of SEO is open to debate, it is always a good idea to test different title formulas and see what works. Then implement the proven formula site-wide, leaving nothing to chance and see how your users respond.

What is Metadata?

Section: Onsite

 

Metadata are small tags hidden away and inserted in the coding of your pages which provide information about the site. This information gives search engines an idea of what a site is about.

Metadata records are created for search engines to get more information about the page, such as who created the page, the title of the page, and more importantly, a short description of the content of the page that can be shown on the search engine result pages.

There is a lot of discussion about metadata and whether or not you should use them in your SEO. For years people believed that Metatags were the secret to high rankings in search engines. While many of the rules regarding metadata remain the same, it is now starting to be accepted that perhaps metadata has become an area of lesser importance when it comes to SEO.

If you look at search result pages from Google, you will see for example a snippet below the title of each page in the list of results. Google creates these snippets from the content of your page unless you have provided a short description Metatag for that page.

Using Metatags correctly is positive because it helps you rank better in most search engines. It is also an opportunity to attract people by writing something appealing and targeted to them.

To conclude, the majority of the SEO community still believe it’s worth adding Metatags in the coding because although they do not determine your results they can have a positive influence in summarising your webpage unique selling points.