Meta information

Meta information is a term used in SEO quite a bit and is very important for Google to rank websites.

If you’ve ever done a Google search, meta information is what you’re presented in the way of 10 blue links with descriptions underneath. For example, this is the meta information for this particular page.

This information is pulled from the HTML source code of the page in question. Google says it doesn’t use this information as a direct ranking signal, but instead uses click-throughs as an indication of the page’s relevance. In other words, the more you can increase the click-through, it will positively impact your page’s rankings.

How does it actually affect SEO?

My experience is that changing the meta information WILL improve rankings, especially if you can mention the primary search term (e.g. “car finance”) at the beginning of the description.

Either way, after you’ve done your keyword research, you need to write meta information for each page of your website. Depending on how you update your website, you can either change this yourself via the CMS (content management system) or give it to your developer or agency to upload.

Dos and don’ts for writing meta information

1. Make sure you include your website name in the browser title. It looks spammy if you don’t, and chances are that Google will add it to the browser title presented in search results if you don’t, anyway. The website name should go first in the homepage and last on the other pages.

2. Make your browser title a single, simple phrase based on your keyword research that states what the page is about in 60 characters or less (including spaces). For example, the browser title for my homepage is “Josef Sarmast | The Truth About SEO – Google owes you nothing”. Don’t get greedy and try to add too many keywords in a single browser title in the hopes that a single page will rank for every conceivable variation of the term it’s targeting. It just looks spammy.

3. Make your meta description simple and inviting, in about 150 characters or less (including spaces). If you can write something that makes people want to click on your page – be that from a call to action or simply something that piques their interest, that will improve that page’s clickthrough rate in search results, which will, in turn, positively influence its ranking.

4. Make every field unique. Duplicate browser titles or meta descriptions are considered bad practice by Google.

5. Don’t leave fields blank. This is considered worse to do with your browser title than your meta description, but don’t do it in any case. If you leave the field blank, Google will try to write its own for the purposes of presentation in search results, but it often doesn’t do a good job. Besides, you should be the one telling your own story.

6. Give your page URL a descriptive, logical name and incorporate the primary keyword if you can. This not only looks better for users, it makes it more clear to search engines what the page is about.