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Title Tags & Meta Descriptions: Rules for SEO Optimization

Metatags are an important way to promote your website via search engines. To put it simply, metatags are specialized HTML elements included in your website’s code. While invisible to users, they contain information that is picked up by web browsers and search engines to help promote your website. This can help maximize the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website.

Introduction

SEO-based promotion cannot thrive without proper metatag placement. You should consider using metatags even as early as your website’s development stage: always make sure they’re included in the code for each page, are properly formatted, and can be easily edited at any point. Proper metatag markup is key to boosting low-frequency queries. Always make sure your SEO-targeted metatags stay exclusive to their own respective pages. Creating metatag duplicates for different pages–or missing them entirely–can and will hinder your SEO process.

Please keep in mind that metatags are not actually necessary to get your website up and running. However, they are a key step in your SEO pipeline.

Common metatags and where to place them

Here are the metatags we will be covering in this article:

  • title — Page title information sent to your web browser
  • description — Page description
  • keywords — Keywords associated with the page
  • robots — Contains indexing rules for search engine bots

These tags are typically placed within the <head> container at the start of the page. You can keep multiple tags in the container depending on your goals. Metatags must be included in the code of every single page of your website and must follow the correct markup format.

Metatags hidden in page code.

Metatags hidden in page code.

Adding metatags to your website

The implementation of templates and metatags usually falls on the web developers. However, setting specific values to metatags is the SEO consultant’s job. Make sure your website’s admin panel lets your SEO consultants manage metatags easily. Metatags can either be set up manually for each page or via automated markup rules.

Checking websites for metatags

To check if your web page includes the necessary metatags, you should take a look at the page code. There are multiple ways of accessing it:

  • Open the page you need, right click while your cursor is within the page area, and select “View page code” in the dropdown menu that opens
  • Pressing Ctrl+U also opens page code
    Web page code
    Web page code

All the available metatags can then be found in the <head> section.

The TITLE metatag (page title)

Use cases and proper syntax

The TITLE tag is a key SEO tool. This metatag refers tothe title of your web page. It must be included on every single page of your website. Here’s what a page without a title looks like in the search engine snippet:

Page without title

As you can see, the page URL acts as the page title when no proper title could be detected. This makes it more difficult for users to accurately search for your website.

A snippet is a small text block with a short description of your website displayed in search engine results. Snippets let users know what kind of website you’re hosting without having to visit it.

However, even if your snippet is accurate, a missing or inaccurate TITLE tag can make it difficult for users to locate your website. 

Because of how the system works, the TITLE tag should be included on every page as it helps you with proper SEO.

The title is placed inside the <head> tag. Here’s what this looks like:

<html>
<head>
...
<title>Page title</title>
...
</head>
</html>

Here’s what a title looks like inside your web page code

Here’s what a title looks like inside your web page code

There are common rules for filling out the TITLE tag. Here’s what you should look out for:

  • What “title” contains
  • Key queries in “title”
  • Stop words in “title”
    Punctuation

12 rules for marking up the TITLE tag

Here’s the area with the TITLE tag in Google search results:

This is what the title looks like in the search results

This snippet is often the determining factor of whether the users are going to visit your page or not. Always make sure your TITLE reflects the topic of the page, is clear to users, and catches their attention.

Tips for creating the TITLE tag:

  1. Always follow the semantic kernel. You should have a clear understanding of common queries for your website, and know the high-frequency queries. Follow the HF-queries and use them when creating your page title.
  2. Choose a page title that fits within 40-70 characters (including spaces), which is the number of symbols displayed in search results. You can make the title longer if you want, but some of the title will be cropped from the search results snippet (the full title will still be picked up by search engine bots, however).
  3. Start your title with the main search query for your page without any changes.
  4. If you’re hosting a regional website/page, use the name of your region/city in your page title. This lets search engine bots display the results in their proper region, and lets users see their region in your page title. Keep in mind: if your website is aimed at multiple regions, there is little point in listing them all.
  5. Don’t overuse key words in your TITLE tag. Stick to one query, maybe two or three queries at most.
  6. Create a unique title for each individual web page. They must never repeat among pages.
  7. Try avoiding stop words, i.e. words that don’t add anything meaningful to the search query. This includes prepositions, articles, or conjunctions. Only use them if the title does not make sense without them.
  8. Look out for special characters (“”= ()/ \ | + _ ) and punctuation marks (– . ! ?). Don’t overuse them.
    Special characters
    Special characters
  9. Don’t make titles too short (e.g. “Contact info”, “About us”). Try to make each title reflect the contents of the page without making them too long.
  10. Include certain dynamic elements in your title, i.e. things that will be changed and updated with time, such as the number of available items, reviews, or pricing information. Search engine algorithms love dynamic titles.
    Attention-grabbing numbers
    Attention-grabbing numbers
    Pricing
    Pricing
  11. Include numbers in your title, as they can be used for attention-grabbing headers (e.g.  “10 tips for…”, “7 standout moments in …”, “12 benefits of…” etc.)
    Numbers and dates
    Numbers and dates
  12. Don’t forget to use proper grammar.

The DESCRIPTION metatag

Use cases and proper syntax

Your page description is also an important SEO factor to consider, as it’s a logical extension of your page title; a description should elaborate on the contents of your title. Still, you shouldn’t just parrot the title: don’t include the same keywords and phrases you already did before, as a description must stand on its own. Whereas a title is more like bait that lures search engine bots, your description should be aimed at the actual users who are going to visit your website, as it often makes its way into the search engine snippet as well. Carefully chosen and coordinated TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags will help the user and the search engine work together to locate your site and boost your SEO:

Search engines consider your website description to be part of the main text body of your website, which is why it’s often included along with other page fragments.

The description is also placed within the <head> tag. Here’s what the formatting should look like:

<html>
<head>
...
<meta name="description" content="Page description" />
...
</head>
</html>

Description displayed in your web page code

Description displayed in your web page code

7 rules for page descriptions

Things to look out for in writing descriptions:

  • Content
  • Length
  • Uniqueness

Here are some page description guidelines to help you with SEO:

  1. The description must contain between 70 and 200 characters (including spaces).
  2. The description for your website must be unique (i.e. no other website should contain the same description).
  3. While you must follow the key queries when creating a description, make sure to make them feel organic. Do not simply copy the key queries verbatim; try changing things around.
  4. All the key words and information must be put at the start of the DESCRIPTION metatag.
  5. Use the DESCRIPTION tag to describe the advantages of your service/product/company.
  6. Try to include some dynamic elements here as well, such as the number of available items on the website, or pricing and discount information, as they help the website stay updated in the search results:
    Some numbers
    Pricing
  7. Try including a call to action (CTA):
    CTA

Here are some useful tips:

  • it’s become popular to put special characters or emojis in web page descriptions. This improves the click rate and supposedly makes the website more enticing to users (however, there is no specific data on that claim). However, make sure not to overdo emoji. The bulk of your description should still be relegated to plain text. Here is an example:

  • You also shouldn’t put emojis as the very first or last thing in your description, as they will be ignored by the search engines and won’t be displayed in the snippet. And remember, not all emojis can or will be displayed to all users across all systems, e.g. iOS users and Android users may have different emoji displays from desktop users.

Make sure all of your web pages have a unique description. If you find any missing or duplicate descriptions, updating them should be your first priority.

Keywords

Let’s briefly cover the KEYWORDS tag, which is now more or less obsolete.

The KEYWORDS tag used to contain the list of all the core queries (keywords) that reflect the content of the corresponding page. The tag lets you list multiple keywords by breaking them up with commas or spaces, with the tag itself placed within the <head> tag. Search engines used to account for that particular format when indexing pages. 

Here is what this look like in the past:

<html>
<head>
...
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords, key word, query, queries, key queries, main queries" />
...
</head>
</html>

Keywords in page code

Keywords in page code

Three rules for Keywords

  1. Use no more than 20 words, or there might be indexing issues.
  2. Don’t repeat a keyword more than three times, as search engines might regard this as spam.
  3. Use typos in your keywords. As typos are natural for users to make, some common typos could actually lead to more popular queries being displayed.

You could list keywords using both spaces and commas, although commas were more popular. Here is an example: <meta name="keywords" content="Wedding Venues Ottawa, Wedding Venues in Ottawa, Wedding Venues weddings Ottawa, Wedding Venues wedding Ottawa" />

Here are some examples without commas:

  • Same format as the comma variant: <meta name="keywords" content="Wedding Venues Ottawa Wedding Venues in Ottawa Wedding Venues weddings Ottawa Wedding Venues wedding Ottawa" />
  • No repeating keywords: <meta name="keywords" content="Wedding Venues Ottawa Banquet Banquet Hall Marriage Place for Rent" />

A properly formatted KEYWORDS tag used to be a good way to boost your visibility. However, this tag is now more or less obsolete.

The ROBOTS metatag

The ROBOTS metatag is contained within <head>…</head>. Here’s what the syntax looks like:

<html>
<head>
...
<meta name="robots" content="xxxxxxxx" />
...
</head>
</html>

This metatag affects page indexing.

Page indexing is the process of searching for, collecting, and adding the information about your website into the search engine’s database, which will then be used when displaying search results to users.

The ROBOTS tag tells search bots whether they should index the page and how they should do it. The content attribute must contain one or more commands detected by the search bots.

The command list:

      • all — index all text and links contained within the page.
      • none — do not index text or follow any links contained within the page.
      • nofollow — don’t follow links on the page
      • noimageindex — don’t index images on the page.
      • noarchive — don’t display “Saved copy” pages in search results.
      • nosnippet — don’t display snippets in search results.

Here is an example of a properly formatted ROBOTS tag:

      • <meta name="robots" content="index" /> — indexing allowing
      • <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> — indexing not allowed

Ideally, you should use the ROBOTS tag on each web page you wish to index. You can also include various extra parameters to tailor your pages to multiple search engines at once, e.g. you can allow indexing for Google but ban it for Bing. To do this, you need to call a specific search bot like this: <meta name="bing" content="noindex" /> — no indexing for Bing, <meta name="google" content="noindex" /> — no indexing for Google.

When filling out these tags, make sure to avoid typos, duplicate modifiers, or mutually exclusive parameters, e.g. allowing and not allowing indexing at the same time. Otherwise, your ROBOTS tag might end up ignored by search engines.

Other useful metatags

Content-type: contains information about document type and its character encoding format. Might affect how images are displayed in browsers. Example: <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">.

Content-language: contains information about your content’s primary language. <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="es">.

Refresh: lets you set the refresh time when loading the page or redirecting a user to a different page. Could prove useful when updating your website, as it lets you redirect a user to a different page while the desired page is under construction instead of simply displaying a 404 error code or making the user wait too long:  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="N; url=URL">.

Meta Author and Copyright: displays the name of the creator of a specific text or image element on the page: <meta name="Author" content="James Water"> (page author), <meta name="Copyright" content="James Water"> (copyright holder), <meta name="Address" content="1026 Baseline Rd, Ottawa, ON K2C 0A6, Canada"> (author/owner address).

Common mistakes when setting up metatags

  • Duplicating the same metatag values for different website pages.
  • Partially repeating the same information for different metatags (e.g. the name of your website/company, certain set phrases like “Here you can find…”, etc.).
  • Making the titles and descriptions too long or too short.
  • Empty metatag values.
  • Overusing keywords.
  • Repeating a tag more than once within the same page (e.g. putting two TITLE tags on one page).

Conclusion

We hope this information proves useful when promoting your website. Follow the proper syntax and our recommendations, and you are sure to receive a nice SEO boost.

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