SEO 101: How to Optimize Your Page Title and Page Description

Empowered with SEO knowledge, the best design and development teams "optimize" sites with eye-catching designs and easy-to-navigate pages that load with blazing speed. This is the bread and butter of many SEO firms. And this is the work many small business owners expect from SEO firms.

However, good content is the true hallmark of all great websites. To achieve high placement on search engine rankings, a website must produce good content. Some website owners produce their own content; some outsource content creation to digital marketing firms, copywriters, or content marketing firms.

Read: What is Good Content? 

What's often missing in these content creation scenarios is optimization. SEO does not end with design and development. Good content is not simply about the text itself. To assure high placement also translates to conversions--when a user performs a desired action on your site--content must be optimized, too.

It's elementary, my dear Watson. Each page of a website, each article, needs a few carefully-selected keywords as well as an optimized title and page description.

With this in mind, it's important to understand the difference between the page title and page description, and how to optimize each to attract the attention your content deserves.

A great title--like JAWS--should be captivating and descriptive. 

Page Title

A title, page title, or title tag is one of the most important SEO elements of a webpage. An optimized title will notify the search engines--and browsers--what your page is all about. Not to be confused with an article or blog title, the title tag is its own distinctive presence (although the page title and article title can often be the same).

The journalist Steve Lohr famously wrote "This Boring Headline is Written for Google," nearly eight years ago, and his point is still the same: the best page titles (and article titles) are simple and straightforward, although not necessarily dull, and written not necessarily for humans but for search engines like Google.

The difference between the page title and article title is simple: the page title is for search engines and browsers and the article tile is for readers.

For a graphic presentation of the difference between a page title and article title, read Kristine Schachinger's article: "How to Write Title Tags for Search Engines."

Remember, a page title, and not the article title, is the title Google uses for your search engine result, so it's crucially important for you to create a descriptive (and hopefully captivating) page title that attracts both Google's web crawlers and browsers. To optimize your page title:

1. Be descriptive with the appropriate keyword or phrase at the beginning of the page title. If your page is about raw denim jeans, your page title should read, "Raw Denim Jeans - The Best Blue Jeans" and not "The Best Blue Jeans - Raw Denim Jeans." It's a subtle difference, but the proper placement of your keyword or phrase can significantly improve your ranking.

2.  Be concise: As Schachinger notes, a page title should be 70 characters max--half the size of Twitter's old 140 character limit.

3. Write different titles for each page of your website.

If you want to visualize how your page title will look on Google, try Moz 's nifty "Title Tag Preview Tool."

Cinema posters often reveal evocative titles and page descriptions. Although a bit obscure for a "page description," the quote here for Pan's Labyrinth offers a intriguing glimpse of the film's content: "Innocence has a power evil cannot imagine." When writing a page description, try to be precise and intriguing.

Page Description

The page title is the title Google uses for your search engine result, and the page description (or meta description) is the snippet of text offered below the page title. In the image below, the page title is "The New York Times - Breaking News, World News, & Multimedia." The description is below the address: "Find breaking news..."

Simple, right?

Although adding a page description to each page seems self-evident, many websites fail to do so, and so Google fills in the blanks. No matter your business, though, it is always best if you write your own page description. After all, nobody knows your business like you.

As we noted above, to write a great page title you should be descriptive and concise, and vary each title by page. The same optimization rules apply to page descriptions.

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Unless you're familiar with coding, you might not easily see how to add a page title and page description to each page of your website. Many D.I.Y website-builders give you the tools to add these elements. If you're working with a web developer, however, make sure he or she is adding a good page title and page description to each and every page on your website.

Your best option. Work with a web developer who also knows SEO.

An SEO Company That Understands Development Optimization and Content Creation: Stepman's SEO!

To build an effective, fully-optimized website, you need a web development company that understands SEO. Stepman's SEO is the rare company that offers a host of SEO and marketing professionals to optimize your website. Contact Stepman's SEO today to learn how you can improve your website's performance: 215-900-9398.