Content
How to write meta titles and descriptions
Write a title under about 60 characters with the primary keyword near the front, and a description under about 155 characters that gives someone a reason to click. Both are rewritten by search engines sometimes — write them well and the rewrite happens less.
Before you start
- One primary keyword allocated per page
- A list of your pages
The steps
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Step 1: Allocate one primary keyword per page
Written down before you start. Two pages targeting the same term is cannibalisation.
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Step 2: Write the title front-loaded
The distinguishing words first, brand name last if at all. Under about 60 characters.
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Step 3: Make every title unique
Duplicate titles across pages tell a search engine the pages are interchangeable.
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Step 4: Write the description as a reason to click
Not a summary. Under about 155 characters, and never truncated mid-word.
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Step 5: Measure the decoded length
An ampersand becomes five characters when encoded. Measure the text a person reads, not the markup.
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Step 6: Check them in a SERP preview
Or simply in the built HTML, at the width they will actually appear.
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Step 7: Re-check after any content change
A title describing a page that has moved on is worse than a generic one.
The measurement mistake worth avoiding
Counting characters in the HTML rather than in the text. On this site a 63-character title measured 67 because the ampersand had been encoded, and the checker reported a failure that did not exist. The ruler was wrong, not the page — decode entities before measuring.
Why descriptions still matter with rewriting
Search engines replace descriptions when they judge a passage from the page more relevant to the query. A well-written description is used more often than a poor one, and it is the version that appears when the page is shared on social platforms, where nothing rewrites it.
The background behind this
Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers the reasoning in about 4 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.