Title tags and meta descriptions: what really works

Two tags decide how your page is offered to somebody scanning a page of results. One is a strong signal about what the page is; the other is a sales line with no direct effect on position. Both are suggestions rather than instructions. A third, the canonical, names which address the result points to.

What each of the two does

The title names the page and the description offers a line under it; they are routinely discussed together and they do different jobs.

• The title

  Written as <title> in the document head, it names the page. It is used as the heading of your result, carries weight in how the page is understood, and it is the single piece of text most likely to decide whether somebody chooses your result over the one above it. If you improve only one thing on a page, this is usually it.

• The description

  Written as <meta name="description">, it does not name the page; it sells it. It has no direct influence on where the page appears. What it can do is change how many people who see your result decide to click it, which is worth real attention for that reason.

Everything else that lives in the head of a document is outside this section. Instructions to crawlers about indexing, such as meta robots, belong to the site in this network that covers indexing, and the tags controlling how a link looks when shared on a social platform are covered in this site's own AI SEO section. This section is about the pair that appears in search results, and only that pair.

They are suggestions, not instructions

A search engine may show text of its own choosing instead of the title or description you wrote.

For the title, it may substitute something else: a heading from the page, text from a link pointing at the page, or your site's name appended or removed. For the description, substitution is not the exception but the common case, because engines routinely assemble a snippet from whatever part of the page matches the query being asked.

That behaviour is not a fault, and it is not a sign that your tag was rejected. It follows from the engine answering a specific query: text you wrote in advance cannot be tailored to a question you did not know would be asked, while a passage lifted from the page can be. The practical consequence is that a description is best treated as the version shown when nothing better fits, which is a useful thing to control and a smaller thing than it is usually assumed to be.

Rewriting is far more likely when the tag is generic, when it is stuffed with terms, when it duplicates other pages, or when it simply does not answer the query. Those are the levers you have, and they are the same levers that make a tag worth reading in the first place.

All of that assumes a tag exists. Where none was written, something is still assembled and shown, and none of these levers is in play at all: the pair written where it is missing is a different problem from the pair written badly.

Where the limit really is

The cut-off is measured in rendered width, not in characters: what gets truncated depends on how much space the text occupies on the screen that shows the result. Google sets no limit on description length and cuts the snippet to fit; where that cut falls, a working target, and how to write the part that survives are covered under meta description length, and the same account for titles under title tags.

What is stable is the technique. Put what matters at the front, so that losing the tail loses nothing important. Read the tag as somebody scanning twenty results would read it rather than as its author. And check what is actually being displayed for your pages rather than what you wrote, since those are frequently not the same text.

Writing ones that get chosen

Titles and descriptions get chosen when they are specific, distinct and front-loaded, and a short set of habits gets you there.

• Be specific before being clever

  A result competes with nine others that are broadly about the same subject. Anything true and concrete about your page beats a well-turned phrase that could sit on any of them.

• Do not repeat the site name in every title

  It occupies space in every result, adds nothing after the first one somebody sees, and is often appended by the engine anyway.

• Write the description as an offer, not a summary

  It should say what somebody gets by clicking rather than restating the title in longer form. Duplicating the title in the description wastes the second field entirely.

• Never write the same pair twice

  Identical tags across many pages are among the strongest signals that neither is worth using, and what duplication costs is a page of its own. On large sites it is usually a template's doing.

• Match what the page actually delivers

  A tag that oversells earns the click and loses the visit, and the pattern is visible in behaviour long before anybody notices it in a report.

What this section covers

Six pages go further. One covers the title tag: how long it can be, what truncation removes, and when Google shows a different title. One covers meta description length: where the cut falls, a working target, and how to write the part that survives. One covers how to find duplicated titles and descriptions across a site, what the duplication costs, and what to do about it, starting with the sources that produce it wholesale. One covers the canonical tag: which of several addresses for one page search should keep, and how to say so. One explains why Google ignores meta keywords, and the last covers featured snippets, the passage Google lifts into an answer box.

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