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Page titles

The <title> tag tells visitors what the topic of a particular page is, and should ideally be unique for each page. If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results and any matching words from the user's search query may be bolded.

Tips

  • Accurately describe the page's content - Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page's content.
  • Avoid:
    • choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
    • using default or vague titles like "Untitled" or "New Page 1"
  • Create unique title tags for each page - Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
  • Avoid:
    • using a single title tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages
  • Use brief, but descriptive titles - Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, engines will show only a portion of it in the search result.
  • Avoid:
    • using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
    • stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags

Meta tags

<meta> tags, embedded into the <head> of a document, provide a quick way to provide some contextual information regarding the page. A page's description meta tag gives search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.

Description meta tags are important because search engines might use them as a preview for your pages if a particularly relevant piece of text is found in the visible body of the page. Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case the engine cannot find a good selection of text to use otherwise.

Tips

  • Accurately summarize the page's content - Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.
  • Avoid:
    • writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
    • using generic descriptions like "This is a webpage" or "Page about baseball cards"
    • filling the description with only keywords
    • copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag
  • Use unique descriptions for each page - Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and search engines, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain. If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page's content.
  • Avoid:
    • using a single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages

Except as otherwise noted, the main content of this document is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Source: Google.