Writing Title and Meta Description Tags
Meta tags are NOT a magic solution to your website appearing at the top of Search Engines. However they do give the site owner some control over how their website is perceived by the search engines. But lets not forget the other important uses of Meta tags such as containing information vital to the correct operation of software like page readers for the blind. It's important to know how to use Meta tags properly and what if any influence they can have on your website rankings.
What is Meta Tag?
Meta Tags are generally placed within the HEAD of a HTML page. These HTML tags can provide the search engines or browsers rendering the content with important information relevant to the webpage. This information could be anything from determining the subject of the page to telling the browser what 'character set' to use.
In this post I am only going to write about two of these tags, 'Title' and 'Meta Description'.
Title Tag
Ok, this is not really a Meta tag, however it's often seen as one and has two important functions on a webpage.
First, the Title tag is crucial for search engines and is one of the factors in how search engines may decide to rank your website in their results. In addition some crawlers/spiders may use the text of your title tag in their listings to describe your webpage. Your Title tag will also be used as the name in bookmarks (if not changed by the user) and in browser reverse bar.
When writing a Title tag think about the key terms you'd like your page to be found for in crawler-based search engines, then incorporate those terms into your title tag in a short, descriptive fashion. Make sure the title always describes the page.
Description Tag
The description tag is your change to tell the search engines or other content readers what the page is all about.
Meta description tags don't really affect the rankings of your pages, having duplicated or short tags may do! Google, for instance, will display A title line, two lines of text from the meta description (up to 160 characters/spaces) and the site URL. A short Meta Description is a lost opportunity to deliver a better message that would result in more visitors.
In some cases you may notice that search engines such as Google listed a description in their results but you did not use a Meta description tag, so why does it matter to you and why include one?
Well if you don't list a description tag or your current description tag is short, duplicated or malformed they either a snippet derived from the content of the page itsself or – if Google chooses - the text description from your entry on the DMOZ website wil be used.
Google has automated this action. However if you write the meta description correctly, Google is more likely to use your text. The advantage of using the text you create in a description tags means you get to control over your message. Think of your entry in the search engine results pages as a 'Small Ad'; searchers are more likely to click on your entry if the message is persuasive, powerful and targeted.
Here are some direct quotes from the Google Webmaster guidelines:
How to create good meta descriptions
- Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content. At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.
- Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or by-line information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise.
To prevent Search engines using your DMOZ description:
If you have already made the mistake of letting Google use your DMOZ description then dont worry.
To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:
To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use the following:
If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance:
Note: that once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear in the index.
Give Me The Simple Rules...
Here are the simple rules to follow.
- The page title (it shows as the very top line on your internet browser) must contain your key phrase or phrases.
- Start the page title with your keywords if possible.
- The page title should not be a list of words, consider it a short strap line.
- A maximum of about 150 characters/spaces
- The meta description is your chance to 'Sell' the page. Make it relevant to the searcher and to the page content
Having lots of Meta tags does not improve your rankings and in some cases can hinder your changes to rank well due to diluting keywords. Lets also not forget that the page content is the most important factor and your ‘title’, ‘keywords’ and ‘description’ tags should reflect and enforce your content and NOT dictate it.
Google does not put much weight on the keyword tag however it’s not completely ignored and I would still recommend using it.
Looking at your website your main targeted keyword seems to be ‘Townsville Web Design’ however your actual content on the home page does not contain this phrase. The fact that you’re top of Google for this phase is simply down to linking sites and lack of competition on the phase. I am sure this phrase gets you little traffic I personally would not be targeting it this way.
Your title tag is just spam, and not meaningful. Your description tag is again just a list of keywords and not really a description of what you do or your page content.
For example, if I was writing your description tag based on your content some like this would be better...
Above and Beyond based in Townsville is a professional web design and development company. We offer website design, web hosting, ecommerce websites including shopping carts. View our web design portfolio for more information.
Your title should then reflect this....
Above and Beyond: Web Design in Townsville
You get the idea.
I would get rid of the keyphrase tag all to together it has no important these days.
What I would also say is that your site has many content issues that also need addressing, even if the meta tags were perfect for the content of your page lots of elements need to be changed some examples...
use of tables for layout. Tables are only valid in XHTML when displaying tabular data. Nested tabled also give search engines problems reading content. There are many other reasons but i won’t go into that here. Your also using inline css for lots of styling on h1 tags etc. The pages really needs to be cleaned up and accessible before the content is addressed for SEO.
I hope this helps, you have lots of useful content on the site and I am sure you do OK because of this. but your site with all that content and inbound links could be doing very well if some other issues were addressed. - hope this comment made sense, very tired lol.
Something happened and now google has indexed most of my pages instead of just the 4 - perhaps the meta description tag kicked in?! But, yeah, all the pages have the same description like you said. I would have though google would choose snippets from each post instead of using the description for the main page for all the posts. And since I've got so many, I don't think it would be efficient to write tags for all of the posts. Tags just do my head in!
If your going to duplicate your description tag then I would just not use it, you will have less control over what Googles uses for its snippets but without a description tag Google will then be forced to pick content from the page as you suggested. I would NOT normally give this sort of advice however if your not going to write different descriptions tag then if will be the only way to avoid duplicated tags and possible errors in the eyes of Google.
I signed up for webmaster a while ago and checked it just now.... You're right, in the diagnostic section, it says there may be a problem with duplicate tags some of the pages. But now my blog is ranked at the top spot when I search for it's name so I'm a bit hesitant of deleting the description meta tag (because it used to be ranked lower than the 10th page of search results before I put in the description).
Another thing to point out is that you are also using tables for layout and some nested tables at that. When you have nested tables spiders have to work harder to find valuable content. It is also a possibility that by using nested tables you break the semantic connections between various parts of the text thus affecting word proximity, accessibility and SEO. I am not saying that tables are bad for layout but using them in this manner makes it hard for search engines and accessibility.
A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is." The rule is too simple to remember.