- What's up, people?
It's Tim from Exposure Ninja here.
And in this video we're gonna look at
what are page titles and meta descriptions.
(dramatic music) (ninja stars whooshing)
(ninja beeping) (cursor clicks)
Page titles and meta descriptions sounds boring.
Why is it important?
Well, page titles and meta descriptions are really important
to help your site in search results.
So in this video we're gonna look at what they are
and I'm mostly gonna show you some tips
for making your page titles and meta descriptions
extra juicy to help your website's performance in Google.
So first up, what is metadata?
Well, metadata is basically data
that's written into the code
or behind the scenes or your website.
And it's there to give software that's using your website
extra information.
So it's a bit like when you upload a photo
from your phone onto your computer
and your computer knows where your photo was taken.
How does it know?
Well, it knows because there's metadata
attached to the photo.
And in exactly the same way,
software can tell what your website is about
because there is metadata attached to it.
Now, the two most important, arguably, pieces of metadata
from a digital marketing perspective
are page titles and meta descriptions.
So, what is a page title?
A page title, or title tag, as they're also known,
is the tile of the page chosen by the website owner.
It's the title that Google usually uses
to show your website in the search results.
So when you're looking through search results,
that blue bit at the top of each search result,
that is usually the page title.
And you'll also see the page title in the browser tabs.
When you've got loads of tabs open
you'll see the page title in each of those tabs.
Unless you're like my sister
where you've got 50 billion tabs open
and they're each two millimetres thick
and there's no room for anything.
So what makes a good page title?
Along my screen now you can see
some examples of good page titles.
"Buy Luxury Watches online - 24 Month Warranty, Chrononext."
Chronext.
So why is this a good page title?
Well, the reason this page title is good
is 'cause you can see that target keyword,
"Buy Luxury Watches online."
That's the phrase that they want this page to rank for,
so they've included it to the start of their page title
which is gonna give it a bit of a lift in search results.
You can also see that they've included 24-month warranty
in their page title.
This is what we call a USP, or a clear benefits theme,
and it's a reason why someone would wanna buy from this site
rather than another site.
The final element in that page title is their brand name.
It's important that you include your brand name
in your page title,
otherwise Google's gonna truncate your page title
and stick your brand name in there anyway.
Here's another example.
"100% Cotton Baby Blankets and Swaddles You'll Love."
Now, it could be better, because swaddles you'll love
isn't necessarily a target keyword,
but what we do have in there is cotton baby blankets
and also cotton baby swaddles,
those words are in there as well.
Both of those are gonna be great target keywords
for this website.
Here you can see a page title
which doesn't actually have the business' brand name,
which is fairly unusual.
But it's still a pretty good one.
"Emergency Dentist in Edinburgh."
That is exactly what that page wants to rank for,
so it's fantastic that they've got it in their page title.
Now here are some bad examples of page titles.
"UK Specialist Watches."
Well, that's just their brand name,
they were gonna rank for that anyway,
so they may as well have included
some target keywords in there.
Likewise, "baby blankets, Boots."
Baby blankets, lowercase.
It doesn't look great, does it?
It doesn't look like a page that you'd wanna click on.
Come on Boots, sort it out, mate.
And then the ever-classic.
"Hyde Associates, Home."
Well, unless you're trying to rank for word home,
there's really no reason to include the word home
in any of your page titles.
They've fallen victim to it.
We have no idea what this page is about from the page title.
Sorry, Hyde Associates, it's a bit of a fail.
So what about meta descriptions?
Well, meta descriptions are the piece of text
that you're asking Google to show
in the description section of your website
when it shows up in search results.
Unlike page titles, Google doesn't actually analyse
your meta description for keywords,
so they don't directly influence your ranking.
But what they do is improve your click-through rate
from Google Search.
Imagine for example
that we're looking through a search results page
and we see a really compelling, super juicy meta description
that makes us click on that page.
Well, that site has now got an extra visitor.
And if that happens over and over and over again,
Google will see everybody clicking on this website.
Now, a higher click-through rate from search results
usually indicates that that website
is really relevant for that term,
so that page could see an increase in ranking over time.
So whilst meta descriptions
don't directly influence ranking,
they can increase your click-through rate
which can improve your ranking over time.
So here are some examples of meta descriptions.
So remember, now we're lacking in the black bits here.
So here are some good meta descriptions.
"Buy and sell luxury preowned watches at Crown & Calibre.
"We're the premier buyer and seller of used luxury watches
"including Rolex, Cartier, and Omega."
So it tells us exactly what that page is about.
To improve this even further,
they could give us some indication of location,
and they could also use some benefit statement, so USPs.
For example, free shipping, free collection,
ensured, guaranteed, best price.
Those types of things can make people
more likely to click on that page
rather than on any of their competitors'.
Here's another one.
It's those cotton baby blankets again.
"Buy 100% cotton baby blankets and swaddles online.
"Free UK deliver over 40 pounds.
"Great selection, excellent customer service.
"Find everything for a" boop boop boop.
Apart from the fact that it's being truncated,
that is an excellent page title, why?
Because it tells us exactly what the page is about
and it gives us not one, not two,
but three great benefit statements,
reasons to click on that website
rather than any of the others.
Great job, Wayfair.
What about some bad page titles?
'Cause everybody loves laughing at idiots.
In this example here, Watches of Switzerland, sorry people.
"We use cookies to improve your experience
"and help us understand how we can make it better.
"Some of these are essential to make this site work."
Oh!
Now, I love cookies as much as the next person,
but I ain't clicking on that website.
Here's another really bad meta description.
"Other options, cotton plaid, cotton voile,
"machine wash, patchwork, pick stitch, ruffle, solid."
They're all just a whole bunch of words
that I don't know how to say.
Now, what's actually happening here is
these aren't meta descriptions that have been inputted
by the website's owner.
What's actually happening instead is that these businesses
haven't used meta descriptions on these pages.
And when you don't use a meta description on your page,
you risk the chance that Google will go
and grab some text from your page and use that instead.
Sometimes Google gets it right,
but often Google gets it wrong.
Even if Google gets it right,
you're typically a better judge of what's gonna make someone
click on your website than Google is,
so it's always a good idea
to include fantastic meta descriptions
on every page of your site.
Now, what about the perfect length
for your page titles and meta descriptions?
Well, hopefully, there isn't one. (laughs)
Well, there kind of is.
Page titles tend to be truncated around 600 pixels,
which is usually between 55 and 70 characters.
We normally recommend people go for 60 characters
in your page title,
that way you're gonna make sure
that you're showing all of that text
without it being cut off.
Meta descriptions, again, can vary widely.
There was a period where Google moved all meta descriptions
to 320 characters,
so we all diligently went about on our website,
lengthening out our meta descriptions,
only for Google to reserve the change
and then we all had to go back and change it.
Cheers, Google!
On the whole, we tend to recommend meta description length
of between 120 to 155 characters.
Again, that prevents it being truncated
and means that you control what's seen by your visitors
when they see your pages in search results.
Now, if you've got a large site you might be thinking,
"Yeah, but I've got 5,000
"page titles and meta descriptions to write.
"Help me Tim, which ones do I do first?"
Well, the real answer is you wanna do
the most important ones first.
So you'll always want to do
the main static pages on your site.
For example, your homepage, your product page,
or your services pages,
the ones that are most likely to rank.
Then, if you're an e-commerce business
with billions of pages, you'll usually wanna start
on your product category pages first
before later on doing your products pages.
You can use Google Search Console or Google Analytics
to find your top search landing pages
and make sure that you're doing those first,
although there's obviously gonna be a bit of a bias here
because the ones with terrible page titles
and meta descriptions might not be ranking
and might not be getting you any traffic.
How do you add page titles and meta descriptions
to your site?
Well, for most businesses
they're on a content management system
like WordPress or Shopify or Magento.
They're usually plug-ins or extensions
or even built into the platform's core functionality.
A little area called something like title, description,
or SEO title, SEO description,
where you just input your text
and out pops your page title and meta description
in your page as code.
Also, check out the social page titles
and meta descriptions.
So as well as your main page titles and meta descriptions,
you also have OG titles and OG descriptions.
Now, OG stands for Open Graph,
and that is the page title and meta description
that will show up when your site
is shared on Facebook, for example, or in Slack.
So it's a good idea to make sure
those OG descriptions and titles are also optimised.
And you can use the same page titles
as your Open Graph titles
and same meta descriptions as your Open Graph descriptions,
if you're unsure.
Why is Google not using
my page titles and meta descriptions?
The most common reason is Google hates you.
The second most common reason
is that your page titles and meta descriptions suck.
I mean, they don't accurately represent
the content of the page.
Here's the deal, sometimes Google is just gonna overwrite
your page titles and meta descriptions
and show something else in the search results completely,
either just to remind you that it's boss
or because it thinks that your page title
and meta description isn't quite relevant for the page.
Sometimes Google will split test
and it'll use machine learning
to work out what sort of content
it needs to show to searches instead of what you write.
This is particularly true if you cram loads of keywords
in your page titles and meta descriptions,
making them really unreadable and a bit spammy looking.
Then Google will often completely ignore them
and grab some content from the page instead.
Also, Google might not have re-crawled your page
since it was last updated.
So if you've only just changed i,
don't have a hissy fit
if it hasn't immediately been reflected in search results.
The best thing to do is force Google
to re-crawl the page in Search Console,
and that should speed things up.
So, I hope you found this guide
to page titles and meta descriptions useful.
To recap, metadata is super secret data
that only NASA and aliens use
and they hide it behind the scenes of your website.
It's a really great way for you to show Google
and browsers and software what your page is about.
Metadata, particularly page titles,
are quite important for SEO.
In fact, they're very important for SEO
'cause they're one of the main initial ways
that Google understands what a particular page is about.
So it's a very good idea to use your target keywords
in your page titles.
Meta descriptions are less used for SEO because Google
doesn't necessarily look at your meta descriptions
to understand the keywords that your page needs to rank for.
Yet, they are still important
because they will influence click-through rate
from search results, which is potentially a ranking factor.
We looked at some examples
of good page titles and good meta descriptions,
and bad page titles and bad meta descriptions.
("Macarena" by Los del Rio)
And we also talked about which page titles
and meta descriptions to optimise first,
how to add them to your site,
and why evil Google might not be using
your page titles and meta descriptions.
I hope you found this video useful.
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