How to Write SEO Meta Titles and Descriptions: The Ultimate Guide

What Are Meta Titles & Descriptions?

Both meta titles and descriptions are code on your website that are used to tell search engines what your website is about (especially meta titles).

Meta Titles

The meta title, otherwise called “meta tags” or “page titles”, are the titles that show up in the browser tab:

As well as the main headline you click on in the Google Search Results:

Meta titles are one of what I consider the 3 pillars of SEO and have one of the biggest effects on how your website will rank. So doing them properly is EXTREMELY important.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the descriptions that appear under the Meta Title in Google Search:

They used to be a ranking factor but they are not anymore, so they WILL NOT affect where your website ranks directly.

However, what they do do is affect the Click Through Rate (CTR), meaning how many people click on your website from the Google Search Page, which at the very least can get more people onto your website, and can therefore indirectly affect your rankings as well.

Rules For Writing Meta Titles & Descriptions

Meta Titles

• Must contain the keywords you want the page to rank for – try to include as many variations as possible (such as lawyer, law firm attorney, area)
• Make sure they are unique on every page (otherwise you’ll get keyword cannibalization)
• Need to be under 600 pixels, which is typically 60 characters or it will get cut off or potentially even rewritten by Google
• Having the meta title the exact same as your H1 headline reduces the chances that Google will rewrite the meta title
• Keeping main keyword as far to the left as possible will increase CTR (since we read from left to right)
• The closer you can get to the exact keyword you want it to show for, the more likely you are to rank (especially true for long tail keywords)
• Go to Google and look at the page 1 results to see what you should be writing, as this will tell you what Google wants to see

Meta Description

• No affect on rankings
• Does affect CTR, so use it to convince people to click on your website
• If you include the keyword, it will be bold which is more likely to attract attention
• If you don’t put a meta description, Google will make one up based on the content from your site, and the results are usually not good
• Keep them under 140 characters to avoid getting them cut off, as they also have a pixel limit

Examples of Writing Meta Titles and Descriptions

Meta Descriptions

Plumber In Sydney

So let’s say you want to rank a page for plumbing in Sydney.

The first I would do is go to SEMRush and type in the keyword to see what keywords we should try and get that page to rank for.

Here are the results:

You can see that we have “plumber Sydney” and the main keyword, and we also have “plumbing Sydney” and “local plumber Sydney”.

Let’s say the name of this business was ABC Plumbing.

Here’s the meta descriptions I would write for this particular page:

“Local Plumber In Sydney NSW – ABC Plumbing”

What that does is it gets the keywords “plumbing”, “plumber”, “Sydney” and “Local” in the meta title.

Now, if you wanted to play around with it to increase CTR, you could do something like

“#1 Local Plumber In Sydney NSW – ABC Plumbing”

Which might help to catch the user’s eye and get their attention. You’d want to test it out and compare CTR.

Family Lawyer in Houston

Again, first thing I would do is type what I think is the main KW into SEMRush to see what other keywords we should include:

We can see that “Family Lawyer Houston” is a keyword we want, as well as “Family Law Attorney Houston”. We’d also want to include “TX” or “Texas”, and potentially the word “best”.

So in this case I would write something like:

“Best Family Lawyer Houston – Texas Family Law Attorney”

That way we have all the keywords we are trying to target within the meta title, and within the character limit.

Meta Descriptions

Let’s use the same examples now for meta descriptions.

Plumber In Sydney

We want to try and get all the same keywords into the meta description so that they show up bold when someone searches.

So for this example I would write something along the lines of:

“Looking for a Plumber In Sydney? At ABC Plumbing, We Offer The #1 Local Plumbing Service In Sydney NSW. Call Us Now For a Free Quote”

I’ve included all the keywords in there, I also included an incentive to click (free quote), and I used title case just to try and make it stand out a little more.

Family Lawyer in Houston

Same situation as above, we want to try and get all the keywords into the meta description and make it enticing to click.

So for this one I would probably go with:

“Looking for a Houston family lawyer? Our Texas Family Law Attorneys Can With Any Family Law Matter. Call Us For a Free 15 Minute Consultation.”

This contains all the keywords, is with the character limit and gives them an incentive to click (free consultation).

How to Add Meta Titles to Your Website (WordPress)

Now that we have our meta titles and descriptions, here’s how to actually add them to your site.

I will show you how to do it using the two most popular SEO plugins for WordPress.

Yoast SEO

Once you have installed the Yoast SEO plugin, click on the page or post you want to optimize.

If you scroll down below the main content area, you will see the Yoast SEO box:

Here you will be able to input the meta title (called SEO Title in Yoast), and the meta description. You can also see that there is a preview snippet which shows you what it should look like in the Google search results.

Once you have finished writing out your meta title and description, make sure to hit Publish to save your new settings.

All In One SEO

Same as with Yoast, you need to install the All In One SEO plugin first.

Once it is installed, click on the page or post you want to optimize.

Scroll down below the main content area to find the All In One SEO box:

Here you can edit the meta title and description, and see the preview at the top.

Once you are done, hit Publish.