Creating Good Meta Descriptions and Titles

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process / methodology of "optimising" your website to increase visibility within Google.  A good meta description and a good title are a critical piece of the puzzle when optimising your website. 

What is a meta description?

A meta description is an invisible "tag" that provides an accurate overview of what a web page is about.  Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages to display a preview for a given page.  Meta descriptions are around 160 characters long.

What is a title tag?

The title tag is an HTML title tag that accurately describes the topic and theme of a web page. The title tag is displayed by the web browser at the top of your browser / window.  Titles are around 50 – 60 characters long.

Let's look at our (TMD's) home page for example.

We are gold coast based web developers (also known as web designers).  

So we've set our title tag to:
Gold Coast Web Development and Web Designers | TMD Online

And our meta description to:
TMD Online is a reliable, experienced and dedicated Web Development and Web Design Company based in Mermaid Beach on the Gold Coast

Some important / key points:

• Each page should have a unique title and a unique meta description.
• The content of this should match up with what the page is about.  In the above example, our title and meta description aligns with what is being said on the page.
• Don't "keyword stuff" your title or meta descriptions with keywords or phrases, e.g. we would NOT set a title to be "TMD Online – Web Developers, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Advertising (SEM) Email Marketing, Web Application Development".