If you want to improve your SEO, it’s mandatory to start optimize your website. In fact, Google’s algorithm is focusing on 200+ elements to determine the order of search results pages. One of those if the meta title and meta description of your pages.
Whare are meta title and meta description and how to optimize them ?
Meta title and meta description : what is it ?
Meta title and meta description are HTML tags which are in charge of how your web pages are going to be displayed on Google. Therefore, each web page has a meta title and a meta description, whether it is a blog, a product page or the homepage of your website.
By default, the meta title is what’s between the <title> tags of the page as followed :
<title>Title of the page</title>By default, the meta description of your page is going to be filled with the first content you can find on the page and the corresponding HTML code is the following one :
<meta name= »description » content= « the description of the page »>Customizing your meta title and description is important for the following reasons :
- It shows Google that you want to improve the way your website appears in the search results
- Users are more likely to click on your page as they can see a precise description of what they’re going to find on it
- Customizing them is a way of using your keywords
- Optimized meta title and meta description make your website looks trustfull
- By telling users what they’re going to find on each page, you help reducing the bounce rate of your website (which is another thing the algorithm is using to determine the order of pages)
How to optimize them properly ?
If you want to optimize your meta title and meta description of your webpages, you need to follow Google’s requirements. In fact, Google gives a limit in term of space and if they are too long, they will be cut as you can see on the following image :
Optimizing meta title
In order to optimize a meta title, you need to make sure that it follows Google requirements. The meta title can’t be longer than 60 characters.
It’s also important to add the name of your company in the title as it helps user to recognize your website straight away.
An optimized meta title would have the following structure :
[Title of the page] – [name of your company]
As an exemple, this blog has the following meta title :
Optimizing meta title and meta description – JNK Consult BV
Optimizing meta description
The meta title of a page has a maximum length as well. If in 2017 Google was displaying up to 320 characters, they changed it to 155 characters in 2018. This HTML tag is usually made of 2 sentences with a perfect writing. It’s mandatory to describe exactly what users are going to find on the page to make them click on your link.
As an exemple, this blog has the following meta description :
« You want to optimize the meta title and meta description of your web pages? We tell you everything you need to know in this blog. »
That’s it, you now have all the informations needed to optimize your meta title and meta description yourself !