Before we get into why your page title and meta description are so important, let’s first make sure we all know exactly what they are. Your page title is the name of your webpage that you will typically see on your web browser tab, but not necessarily within the content of the webpage itself.
Take a look at the example of our own website below. You can see the page title is “Pay Monthly Websites | Creating Optimum User Experiences” yet this exact title does not appear within our page content.
The page title will also appear in Google’s search results.
In the search results you will also see a short description under the title. This is the meta description of the webpage. And both the title and the meta description will also be used by default when shared on social media platforms such as Facebook.
Why Is It Important?
The title and meta description are important for two main reasons. Firstly, whether it be on a Google search or social media, the title and description is what people will see first. And it is only after reading them that they make the decision of clicking through to your website or not. This is why they should both be written in a way that clearly states what the page is about and also why the person should click through (features, benefits etc…)
The second and equally as important, if not more important in some cases, is that the title and meta description are use by Google to help determine where you appear on search results. Let’s say you are a carpet cleaning company in Liverpool called SuperClean. If your webpage title simply says “SuperClean” then it is going to be much more difficult for you to appear in search results when people are looking for “carpet cleaning company in Liverpool” even though that is exactly what you do!
So your page title should say what you do and reflect what main search term you would like to appear for in Google, and your meta description should further confirm this as well as adding some additional reasons for people to click through.
If you are a WordPress user (yes, we love WordPress), then there is a great SEO plugin by Yoast where you can easily edit the page title and meta description for any page, along with the option of creating custom titles and descriptions for Facebook and Twitter.
