META Titles & Descriptions

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

Research carried out by SEOmoz indicates that the majority of SEO professionals still consider the use of key-phrases in META title tags to be the most important on-page element for optimising your content. Following on from Chapter Sixteen: Content Generation & Formatting, this chapter of my small business SEO guide looks at best practice techniques for optimising your META titles and descriptions. To go back to the start of this guide you can read my introduction.

META Title Optimisation

In the last chapter I discussed the importance of using your key-phrase research to determine a content generation plan based on quality and “linkability”. Prior to publishing your content, there are two more elements to consider: these are the META title and description tags. Following on my On-Page Optimisation Overview, here are some more key considerations for optimising your META titles:

• Consider the purpose and aims of your content when determining your META title and integrating your one main key-phrase. If your page advertises a very specific product then include the exact product specification plus an incentive to purchase. Exact product specifications are another way to target the “long-tail” as discussed in part nine.
• As discussed in the previous chapter, ensure that the main key-phrase used in your META title also appears in your on-page copy and page mark-up such as your H1 tags.
• Some small business owners may wish to develop a brand identity within their particular niche by adding their company name to each META title. If you choose to do this, best practice would be to add this to the far right of the title. For example, “Bike Repairs in Eastbourne | Mike’s Bikes”. This title ensures that the weight is given to the main target key-phrase “Bike Repairs” first, the long-tail target “Bike Repairs in Eastbourne” second and the brand name third.
• Use the pipe or dash symbols to break up your title content, if necessary. This can enable you be quite specific about the nature of your page content. For example “Bike Repairs – How to Fix Gears | Mike’s Bikes”.
• Limit your titles to less than 65 characters to ensure that it is not truncated by the search engines.
• Don’t repeat your key-phrases over and over again. For example, “Bike Repairs | Bike Repairs Eastbourne | Bicycle Repairs | Cycle Repairs”. This isn’t appealing to search engine users and search engines won’t like it either.
• Try and entice search engine users with what’s unique about your web page content. For example, “Fast Bicycle Repairs in Eastbourne | 24 Hour Service”.
• Be creative and with your content and titles – when both of these elements are well thought through and executed, your click-through rate and conversions will increase significantly.

Meta Description Optimisation

To avoid the search engines randomly displaying text from the body copy of your document you can write a META description that contains the specific content, key-phrases and incentives that you want search engine users to see. Here are some key considerations for optimising META descriptions:

• Ensure that your description is not a straight copy of the META title tag. This could be construed as keyword stuffing.
• Ensure that your description uses exact phrases and sentences used in your body copy to ensure a high tag to page content relevancy.
• Include your sales messages and call-to-actions in your description tag. Again, this will improve your click-through and conversion rates.
• Limit the copy for your description to 150 characters to ensure that it is not truncated by the search engines.
• Incorporate synonyms and phrase variants into your description copy. Again, this helps reduce the risk of keyword stuffing.

The keyword META tag is now obsolete so you don’t need to include this. Small business owners should be aware that writing great titles and descriptions will not immediately transform your website into an overnight success. Once your content is published, you need to promote it and gain trust and popularity for it via a number of off-page optimisation factors. These off-page factors will be the focus of the next three chapters.

Title and Description Checklist

• Take time to consider the structure of your page titles and descriptions
• Include powerful sales messages and benefits of viewing your content
• The meta keywords tag is now obsolete – don’t bother adding this

Part Eighteen

The next chapter of this guide will look at the crucial off-page process of link-building paying particular attention to ethical methods small business owners can employ to increase the “linkability” and SEO potential of their sites. Click here to go to part eighteen.