How to Write Title Tags and Meta Descriptions | Conversations with a Copywriter

Writing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

If you want your website to grow with SEO on Google, the title tags and meta descriptions are the first piece of content searchers are seeing. Whether you’re writing a blog, guide or case study, this guide will help you turn your knowledge into post-worthy content that can be understood by both users and search engines.

Title Tags

Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages as the clickable headline for a given result. Generally, article title tags should be under 70 characters, ideally between 50-60, to ensure the title is not shortened in search results. If an article title must exceed 70 characters, that is okay as long as the target keyword is near the beginning of the title.

Pro Tip: Make sure you don’t write out numbers in title tags, or headings, for that matter. Numbers are written like 1, 2, 3 or 1st, 2nd, 3rd catch people’s attention better and take up less space. For blog posts, if your H1 is optimized properly, it will likely work as the title tag.

Example Title Tags

Goodwill

When writing and publishing a new blog post, the post title needs to be evaluated to see if keywords with a decent search volume are utilized. An example of this would be this article’s original title “SOLVING THE COMMUNICATION FEAR FACTOR”

By going to Semrush.com and typing in “communication fear,” the report comes up blank, which shows that people are not searching for this term at all. To improve the title for search, we need to add in a keyword or phrase that does have search volume. In this case, “communication skills” is a good option, making our new title “COMMUNICATION SKILLS: SOLVING THE COMMUNICATION FEAR FACTOR”.

While this is a broad stroke on managing keyword research, adjusting the title to capture the rhetoric of your target audience is the first step. When you pivot your keyword direction, try to include any newly-added keyword or phrase into the content body to help add additional context and support to the overall piece.

Meta Descriptions

All SEO-focused content needs an optimized title tag as well as a meta description. While a title tag is the page title, a meta description is a short summary of the page on a search engine’s results page or SERP.

Meta descriptions can be any length, but Google generally truncates snippets to about 155–160 characters. It’s best to keep meta descriptions long enough that they’re sufficiently descriptive, so we recommend descriptions between 50–160 characters.

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