How to Write the Best SEO Title and Meta Description

 Even if you have an optimized website, the best keywords, and a perfect content strategy, you might be missing these two crucial things for your business’ success! If you don’t have an enticing SEO title or engaging meta description accompanying your content, the chances of your website being seen (let alone ranking on search engines) falls drastically. 

Imagine you are looking at a Google Search Engine page. Each result you see has a blue headline and black subtext underneath. That blue headline is your SEO title and the black text underneath is called your meta description. Each and every page on your website has it’s very own SEO title and meta description. And yes, you should absolutely be writing this yourself not letting your website provider automate this. The automations are great when set up correctly, but what we usually find is that these titles and descriptions will end up being way too long.

Your title is the first thing your audience will see, so it needs to be eye-catching! 

What Is An SEO Title?

Think of your SEO title like a paid ad. How can this headline entice a click? An SEO title is one of the most important aspects of your website content, so it needs to be attention-grabbing to draw in your audience. 

We suggest writing your SEO title to be 50-60 characters so your entire title will show up on the SERP. As you compose your SEO title, make sure to incorporate keywords about your business and the services you offer as early as possible. Relevant keywords ensure that your title answers what people are searching for. It also helps your website rank on search engines. 

Your SEO title needs to be readable, which means using title case to stand out. It should have proper grammar, spelling, and capitalization. Error-riddled SEO titles aren’t inviting because they aren’t readable or credible to your audience or search engines.

Quick Tip: Leverage characters like the vertical line and ampersand to help save space!

Another question we get all the time is when to use your brand name in an SEO title. The answer is definitely not everywhere. We suggest only using it on your home page because it’s likely people aren’t searching for your brand name. They want the solution you provide! For blogs, don’t use your brand name at all; focus on the question you’re answering with the content.

Our favorite SEO title “equation” is: Keywords + Context / Urgency + Brand

SEO titles are just one thing you need to include for your content to be successful. Don’t forget the meta description! It’s just as essential as the title. 

What Is A Meta Description?

Your meta description should elaborate on your title or provide more context to what’s on the webpage. Meta descriptions that represent your content well encourage your audience to click on the search result, which will help boost your website’s ranking. Your SEO title should grab your audience’s attention, and the meta description should get them to click on the result. 

Don’t treat meta descriptions like a social media caption or intro to a blog post. There isn’t much space for the description when it shows up on a SERP, so every word counts! Make sure you include keywords about your business/services, who you are, or where you’re located. Meta description should be 155-160 characters, which can fit almost everything you need on those two lines of the SERP.

Our favorite meta description “equation” is: Keywords + Pain Point / Benefit + Call to Action

Your SEO title and meta description should complement each other, but they shouldn’t be repetitive! If both contain relevant (but different) information about your business and website, then it will drive traffic and engagement to your website. 

How To Write The Best SEO Title And Meta Description

It might seem like there are a lot of rules to master when writing great SEO titles and meta descriptions, but it isn’t too hard! This is something I want you to remember because this is going to take all the stress away from this little SEO optimization.

SEO titles are a ranking factor.

Meta descriptions are NOT a ranking factor.

This has actually been confirmed by the head of search at Google! Although it’s best practice to use keywords in your meta description it’s not going to affect where you rank on the page.

Here are a few best practices we use when we write our own.

UTILIZE ONLINE TOOLS

These are some of my favorite tools to use when writing these two things for my clients.

MRS Digital when I am writing this  myself

AI tools. Ubersuggest has a brand new one under their Labs tab and you can get a personalized writer for things like SEO titles, meta descriptions, headlines and more. 

I also love to use ChatGPT. I ask it to give me 5 options of meta descriptions for a web page in this industry, using this keyword. Be specific!

KEYWORDS

We’ve touched a bit on this already, but we can’t stress enough how important it is to use keywords in your titles and descriptions. A LOT of SEO success depends on the keywords used to drive traffic and build online visibility. 

The best way to incorporate keywords into your titles and descriptions is to research some relevant to your business. These keywords should ideally have a high search volume and low to medium competition. These types of keywords help your website compete and rank on search engines. 

LEVEL OF DETAIL

Next, your titles and descriptions should hit the right balance of simple and descriptive. A nonexistent title or description will do nothing (or possibly hurt) your business’ search rankings. SEO titles and meta descriptions that are too simple aren’t compelling enough to pull in your audience because it lacks context and relevance. An SEO title and meta description with too much detail usually have more information than the character limits allow. 

If titles are too long, they’ll trail off into ellipses. Ellipses aren’t always a bad thing, but your audience is less inclined to click on the search result of your business if the title or description doesn’t address their search inquiry right off the bat.

A well-written SEO title has keywords, context, or urgency to click on your website and your brand. An effective meta description should have keywords, an audience pain point you’re resolving or a benefit they get from your content, and a call to action to encourage them to click on the result. 

If you have to take away one lesson, let it be this: Keywords take priority! So much of your SEO success hinges on the keywords you use, so make sure they’re relevant to your business. 

One final piece of advice: If you update any of these, be sure to request a manual recrawl in Google search console. This helps Google index your new data and serve it to people faster.

We can’t stress enough how crucial compelling SEO titles and meta descriptions are for your business’s online visibility and organic traffic. We hope these tips and tricks gave you some guidance on crafting the best titles and descriptions! 

10 SEO Practices Everyone Should Follow

 Search Engine Optimization, better known as SEO, can be a marketer’s best friend. (Who knew three little letters could have such a big impact?). Whether or not you’re a marketing wiz, you should brush up on a few key SEO practices. Entrepreneurs, bloggers, and anyone with a web presence can benefit from making sure their website is in tip-top SEO shape. These 10 SEO practices will help you cover all of your bases — so you can sit back, relax, and let that search engine traffic roll in.

1. Understand it

The first step to SEO success is understanding exactly what it means and what its capabilities are. As previously mentioned, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO helps optimize web pages so they can reach a higher position in the results of a search engine — most importantly, to rank higher on Google. Improving your ranking increases your odds of someone clicking on your webpage in a search result. Because SEO is not a paid effort like an ad, this traffic is organic.

2. Utilize Keywords

This step is the second most important, and lays the groundwork for almost all of your SEO efforts. In order to rank higher in search, you have to align your web page’s content with Google’s (or another search engine’s) algorithm. One of the primary ways of doing this is by choosing the right keywords. A keyword refers to the words used on your website that you want to rank for. For example, if you own a bakery in Boston, you would want to rank highly for “Boston bakery.” You can choose secondary keywords to focus on like “best bakery in Boston.” You must choose keywords carefully. You want to choose ones that match your businesses’ goals, but that also aren’t overused by other websites. Essentially, many people are competing to rank highly with the same keywords.

There may be hundreds of other websites hoping to rank first on Google for your chosen keyword. If that is the case, you may be able to stand out by picking a less common keyword. Something more niche, such as “gluten-free Boston bakery” may do the trick. You can add keywords to many different places on your site to get the best results. Not sure where to start? 

3. Title Images

You know how you can search for images on any search engine? When someone uploads a photo to their website, they name it with the keywords that they want to rank for. So if you want photos of your business, product, or blog to show up on image search results, you have to properly name them. You’ll have better luck getting users to click through to your website if your photo is properly named. In other words, this is not a time to play games. If you’re posting a photo with a title “vegetarian sandwich recipe” make sure the photo actually reflects that title. Not taking advantage of image search results is a waste, and is a step many people forget to take.

4. Blog About It

Have you noticed that every company under the sun has a blog now? In the past, only actual blogs or publications shared articles and content online, but now everyone does it because blog posts are the perfect place to drop desired keywords. Not to mention, search engines rank quality content higher than an average web page. It’s important that your desired keyword shows up in the first 100 words of a blog post. That way, the search engine can confirm that your content matches the title of your post. Which brings us to our next point…

5. Give it a Name

When it comes to blog posts, it’s important that you use your keyword in the title of the post. Ideally, the keyword should be as close as possible to the beginning of the title. If your keyword is “spring dresses,” the blog title should be “spring dresses under $100” not “the cutest spring dresses.”

6. Link it Up

Linking to other web pages can be extremely beneficial for SEO purposes. There are two types of links that you should utilize: external links and internal links. External links are those that send users to another website with a page on a similar topic. While it seems counterintuitive to lead users away from your website, search engines see you doing so as creating a valuable resource to readers. You can also include internal links in your content; this encourages search engines to find and review other pages on your website. Plus, they help the search engine determine the relevancy of your pages. If possible, you should link to at least two internal links on each blog post.

7. Get Linked

Now it’s time for a little old-fashioned PR. If your website has a link on someone else’s website, you’re looking at a marketing double whammy. Not only will you get a great PR opportunity and see organic referrals come through, but you’ll also raise your status in the eyes of search engines. When your website link shows up on another website, this is earning a “backlink.” Google keeps track of the quantity and quality of your backlinks. These links represent authority — if another website feels the need to mention you, Google takes that as a sign of your expertise and is more likely to recommend your content to users.

8. Make it Meta

No, we’re not getting philosophical here. Meta-title and meta-description tags are two pieces of code that determine how you rank in search. A meta-title (which can differ from a blog post or page’s actual title) is the title that will show up in search listings; the meta-description is that small blurb beneath the title on a search result. This description allows both the search engine and a user to understand what your webpage is about.

9. Simplify URLs

How you name your URLs is super important in the SEO world. Basically, search engines don’t like to read long URLs with complex structures. It’s best to always keep URLs short, and make sure they contain little more than the main keyword for which you want to rank.

10. Stay Updated

Like all areas of life, time brings change — and one of those changes can easily be to a search engine’s algorithm. Just as you think you’ve mastered SEO, Google or any other search engine can pull the rug out from under you by changing their algorithm — meaning that what once helped you rank highly may not any more. Keep an eye on your search traffic and make tweaks where needed. Stay updated on the latest SEO strategies and algorithm updates. Keeping abreast of current SEO trends is one of the best ways to make sure you’re using SEO to its fullest potential.

Optimize Blog Post For SEO

 If you have a blog, chances are you already understand the importance of business blogging and its SEO benefits. But do you know how to optimize your blog posts to make them more search engine friendly?

The truth is, many bloggers fail to take advantage of the enormous marketing potential of their blogs. In fact, a recent study by blogger.com shows that although roughly 60% of businesses have blogs, 65% of those blog owners haven’t even updated in the past year! By providing fresh, relevant content and performing basic blog post optimization, you can take advantage of the many benefits blogging offers.

Here are six easy search engine optimization (SEO) tips to help get your blog noticed.

1. Do your research. 

Keyword research is essential for on page optimization. Chances are you are naturally including keywords without realizing it simply by providing valuable content on a topic. However, there are a variety of tools and techniques for finding related keywords relevant to your blog post that you may not have considered. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool and semrush.com both offer great tools that allow you to find keywords related to your topic and even spy on your competition to see what words and phrases they are targeting to bring traffic to their sites.

2. Utilize keywords throughout your post. Once you have targeted a couple of valuable, relevant keywords, it is important to place them where they will have the most impact for humans and search engine crawlers indexing your content. Try to include them in the following places:

Title

Headings and subheadings

Introductory sentence

Concluding paragraph

Anchor text (text you hyperlink to other related pages on your site)

Title tags and meta descriptions

A word of caution: Don’t engage in keyword stuffing, which is the act of filling your content with so many keywords that it becomes difficult to read. Not only will this irritate your blog followers, it will also get you penalized by Google. A couple of strategically placed keywords will do the trick.

3. Optimize your images. Whenever you upload a photo to your blog, be sure to include keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with a brief, keyword rich description of the photo.

4. Reference others with links. When you mention another blogger or article in your blog post, include a link to the information you are referencing. Not only is it good blogging etiquette, but you may also get lucky and receive a link back. Quality links are a valuable commodity for any site looking to rank higher in search engine results pages.

5. Give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog. Include prominently placed RSS or Feed Subscription Buttons and offer viewers the ability to subscribe to your posts via email when possible. This allows your blog followers to have instant notification of your latest posts without having to periodically check your site for new content.

6. Use social media to broaden the reach of your blog posts. As a small business, you may be utilizing Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or other social media sites to create connections with potential and current customers. Why not promote your blog content on these sites for even more web exposure? Free programs like Hootsuite make it easy to post links to your latest blog post on all of your social media sites with just a couple of clicks. You can even schedule your posts ahead of time!

By following these simple SEO tips, you can encourage higher rankings in SERPS, increased web traffic, and higher customer conversion rates.