Metadata is made up of your title tag and several meta tags, including keywords and description. Getting it right helps search engines understand your site and helps searchers decide to click.
The site’s title tag
The title tag appears in the browser tab and in search engines as the clickable text in search results. Search engines also place a lot of weight on this tag when working out what your site is about.
To get the most keyword value from your title tag, keep your keywords as far to the left as possible. Instead of “What you can achieve with KEYWORD”, try something like “KEYWORD helps you achieve this” – moving the keyword from last word to first immediately adds value for the page’s leading keyword. Try this across your pages, especially your homepage, which traditionally carries more SEO value than other pages.
Keep page titles between 50 and 60 characters – search engines cut off longer titles. Don’t use keyword lists; they’re treated as spam.
Meta description
The meta description appears in Google below the title when your page shows up in search results. Make sure each page’s description is unique to that page while still being informative – search engines don’t like the same description on several pages, since it makes it hard to tell which page is most relevant.
If you haven’t set a meta description, Google uses part of your page’s content instead – usually text right after the opening body tag, or the first text that closely matches the searched keyword.
The meta description should be concise, grammatically correct text. Keep it between 50 and 160 characters – search engines cut off longer descriptions.
Meta keywords
Finally, add some keywords that match what’s in your title and description tags. You can add as many as you like, but the fewer you have, the more effective they are. All keywords should be relevant to your site’s content, and ideally also appear in the main text and main heading. When popular keywords are included in your metadata and content, search engine crawlers pick them up, helping your site be categorised and ranked correctly.
There are many SEO techniques that can improve your search ranking – these simple steps are a good place to start.