There's More to Title and Description Than Just SEO
Written by on October 7, 2009 @ 8:15 AM.
If you know a little bit about search engine optimization or have read our post on SEO Basics, you know that the title and meta description are critical elements of ranking well in the search engines, but there's more to a great title and description than just SEO.
Wait! Where are My Title and Description
The title and meta description are both found in what web designers call the header of your page. It's just a little bit of code that a web developer puts into your website. The code looks like this...
<title>Title and Description for Marketing and SEO | Crashbox Creative, LLC</title>
<meta description>Title and description are for more than just SEO. They are the only thing that gets searchers to click to your site. Craft them carefully.</meta>
If you look way up at the top of this browser window, you'll see one of the things the title tag does for your website. See how the top of your browser window says "Title and Description for Marketing and SEO | Crashbox Creative, LLC?" That's one of the things the title tag does.
More importantly, the title tag shows up in search results. Take another look at the sample title and description above. When this page shows up in search engines, the title tag becomes the blue link you see at the beginning of each search result. The description is the text below that link.
Both title and description play a major role in how you rank in the search engines, but that's not all they do.
To Click, or Not to Click
Imagine for a moment that one of your important web pages has been well optimized for search engine ranking and comes up at #1 on Google. Does that mean everyone's going to click on it?
Not necessarily.
If the title and description for the second position on Google appear more likely to be what the searcher is looking for, they're going to pass up your page for the next one in line.
On the flip-side, if your page only ranks #3 or #4 but has a better title and description, people will pass up #1 and #2 to click on your page.
Your title and description need to be optimized for search engines, but they also need to have a lot of marketing pull. It's a balancing act, no doubt about that, but if you balance the two nicely, you'll get a lot more traffic to your website.
