Title and Description Tags are Important

Meta Data is usually invisible to visitors unless you hit the F12 button and inspect individual elements in Google Chrome. And surprising to many, most Singapore websites are missing these key components. Website designers have one goal in mind; to design a website that looks aesthetically pleasing and to give visitors an enjoyable visit throughout the website. But, did you know that there is deeper information that you can utilise to convert visitors to customers by just changing a few meta data.

meta data is information that provides more information. Meta data is usually read by search engines provide different information to its users searching for items. So why does this matter?

Google uses these information to rank your website

Google uses multiple facades of algorithms to rank your website and your data is one of the essential ones. Meta data such as the title tells Google what the page is about and the description also provides Google with some keywords they can gather to categorise you into the correct keyword group.

What can I do?

Make sure that the content on the specific page has a suitable title. The title tag and description should not be too far off from the content of the page.

Adding meta tags and data is visitor centric

ever searched for a keyword on Google and found total rubbish on various search results? While it is difficult to find because Google places a large emphasis on getting people what they search for. You easily find traces of these at the back of the pages of your search result. See the below pictures as example. The first picture shows page 1 of a Google search while the second shows page 10.

Page 1 of search: things to do in Singapore

Page 10 of search: things to do in Singapore

Although the content is fairly similar, you can tell which is the more attractive title tag. For most of the descriptions in the first picture, the descriptions are also specially placed by the web administrator unlike page 10 where you can tell most of the descriptions are pulled out from existing content from the website.

So what are the best practices?

Unique Title tags

There is nothing more confusing than multiple entries of title tags on more than 1 page of your website. This will also confuse search engine robots scanning your site and the page which you want to be ranked might be ignored as a duplicate.

Limit the length of title and description tags

There is a limit to how many characters a title tag can hold, the default is usually 70 characters includes spaces while descriptions are limited to 160. Exceed this amount and you’ll see “…” at the end of your title tag and descriptions. Trust me, it does not look professional.

Reflect the purpose of the article/page

The words you use for the title should reflect the purpose of the article or post, it should not contain stop words such as “and” “is” “then” and other more.

In conclusion, title tags and descriptions are one of the most effective ways to show the search engines that your website is done professionally and also to convert visitors into customers. Spending a little time before publishing your page will go a long way.