Writing for the Web: Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Humans tend to overcomplicate things. And that, I believe, is the reason writers and content marketers seem to stress over the minutiae of SEO title tags and meta descriptions (and their OpenGraph counterparts) when writing for the web. Depending on the type of page you're creating, these bits of metadata can be either mission-critical or practically useless.

Title tags and meta descriptions are important because they are what gets displayed on the search results page (though not always — we’ll get to that). When a web page contains little written information as part of its content (a dynamically-generated product page or a photography portfolio, for example), title tags and meta descriptions help search engines and the people using them understand what the page is about.

However, long-form content doesn’t have this problem. Blog posts, news articles, and potentially even things like About pages have plenty of information on the page itself for Google to judge your work without relying on metadata. You still shouldn't leave these elements blank, as we’ll get to shortly, but they become far less critical. In fact, Google will often rewrite meta descriptions and title tags to better fit any given search query. In my experience, I have not once seen my custom meta description display in search results for a piece of long-form content, which feels a bit disheartening, but I guess Google knows best.

In writing for his website the Marketoonist, marketer Tom Fisburne recalls a talk he attended by Jono Alderson, former head of Yoast (the company behind the wildly popular SEO plugin for WordPress). Fishburn writes:

“Several of [Alderson’s] observations resonated with me, including the insularity of using the same search engine optimization checklists as everyone else as a starting point to create anything.

“The result is a pool of lookalike articles, written for search engines, not written for people. The actual writing is often treated as an afterthought.”

That such observations came from one of the SEO world’s biggest players is telling. When writing for the web, don’t forget who your real audience is.

Why title tags matter

Like it or not, title tags do contribute to a page’s search rankings, although how much is unknown. This is why you definitely shouldn’t leave them blank. Beyond that, the idea is that you should make your title tag descriptive and enticing, something that encourages searchers to click on it. But this is more or less the same approach to writing any headline. If you have a strong headline, you can copy and paste it to your title tag and kind of just be done.

There are situations where this won’t work, though, such as when your headline is too long (or too short). Optimally, title tags should fall between about 50 and 60 characters; titles outside that range may be rewritten by Google. So rewording your headline to fit within those constraints is a good idea.

You may also want to change your title tag from your headline simply to match a style. I once wrote for a tech news outlet where we had to write SEO titles in title case, whereas our headlines were written in sentence case. I see a lot of search results written in sentence case, though, including from articles published by Google, so I don’t think this is a big issue.

Why meta descriptions matter

Unlike title tags, Google does not consider meta descriptions in a page’s ranking. Here, the consensus among SEOs is that a description still provides useful context to the user and is another opportunity to entice them to click your link. The problem is, at least as far as articles and blog posts go, meta descriptions seem to rarely show up in search results.

Why is this? Because Google understands your audience better than you do. And even if it doesn’t, it thinks it does. Google will pull whatever copy from the page it thinks is the most helpful to the user based on the search query. Sometimes, this will be the portion most directly related to what someone searched for. Other times, it seems to be almost random.

But remember: if your page doesn’t have much copy on it, a meta description is more important.

Putting it into practice

If you’re writing short-form copy for a web page, title tags and meta descriptions should be a key consideration of your approach. If the page title is something generic, like “Store” or “Blog,” use a more descriptive title tag that will help Google and users learn more about the page.

Your on-page copy should always be the main focus, but remember that a web page contains a lot of context that won’t be available in a search result. A meta description should explain the page simply, so that it’s clear what the page is about absent any additional context.

For long-form content, things are less critical. You’re likely already creating a strong headline and enticing excerpt, and simply copying those elements to the title tag and meta description fields may be all you need to do. Remember, the actual content of your article is what matters most — both to Google and to your human reader.