[wizely]

Part 13
The nuts and bolts of robot food

What are the meta titles and meta descriptions for?

Let's get the word meta out the way. Meta data just means data that describes something about other data. Some people think that means data for machines (robot food), but that's only true if that data is only read by machines. Your meta titles/ description are read by people too – in SERPs. So let's bin the inedible robot food and try something more palatable.

Your meta titles/ descriptions must:
1. Tell search engines what they describe (a webpage) is about
2. Tell people what they describe (a webpage) is about
3. Get a response from real people (to click through to the webpage)
And they must do this within seconds. It's fundamentally no different to what must be done by any header/ paragraph, blog title/ excerpt, article title/ summary etc.

But aren't meta titles/ descriptions just about SEO?

Meta titles/ descriptions are important in SEO but there's more to it than that because the whole point is to get visitors to your webpage not just to appear first in the SERPs.
You may convince a search engine robot that your webpage ranks highest for a search but real people may not agree.

Let me show what I mean. Which of the following would you say is more appealing?:

Quote

Tim Tam | Freelance Web Designer | ecommerce Solutions | Graphic…
Tim Tam | UK Freelance Web Designer | ecommerce Solutions | Web design | Website design | SEO | Graphic design | Torquay | Paignton | Brixha…

Quote

Small Business ecommerce Websites by Devon Web Designer Tim Tam
ecommerce websites for Devon small business by web designer/ graphic designer Tim Tam. This year's surest investment to grow your business

The aim of course is to write titles/ descriptions that help the page appear top of the SERPs and appeal most to potential customers. But well written titles/ descriptions will help you 'poach' visitors from higher ranking competitors. And badly written ones will lose you visitors to lower ranking competitors.

What you need to write your title and description

Ready to start actually writing the titles/ descriptions for your webpages? OK, all you need is:
1. An in-depth knowledge of your target audience
2. A solid understanding of your business and your website's objectives
3. To know your competitors inside-out
4. High quality content written and structured to meet the needs of points 1-3
5. A website architecture based on point 4
6. Some simple 'technical specifications'
For all writing (remember poFint?), you need to know exactly what you're writing for. As we're talking about a short summary of a whole page here you really need to know exactly what the page is for. This is made easier by focused, well structured and content-based site architecture.
Got points 1-5 covered? Excellent, let's move onto point 6 then.

Some simple 'technical specifications'

I use the following limits as guides to ensure all the text gets displayed – you can go a little bit longer, but you'll need to test as it depends on sentence structure:
A. Titles must be no longer than 64 characters (including spaces)
B. Descriptions must be no longer than 140 characters (including spaces)
Um, that's it.

A simple style guide for your titles and descriptions

The critical factors here are getting across what a webpage is about quickly (in very limited space) and getting searchers to click through. For that it makes sense to:
I. Have a page focused only on one or two highly related things
II. Have your title/ description match your content (be an accurate summary)
III. Order what you write in descending order of importance
IV. Write as concisely as possible - much more than normal to fit the small space
V. Make your title/ description as appealing as possible to click-throughs
It also makes sense not to waste the opportunity to start selling or at least pre-sell from the first point of contact.

You can call all this SEO if it makes you feel better but it's fundamentally no different to any other kind of web copywriting and what I've been talking about focuses on real visitors. Search engine algorithms are, after all, just computers attempting to model real visitors. However, thinking only of robots and not making your title/ description attractive to real people will mean wasting a high search engine ranking. Robot food isn't fit for human consumption.

I promise we're not leaving this subject (i'm just getting cramp in both my typing fingers!) - in an up-coming article we'll be getting down to some examples. But before we do, let's make sure we know how to get the most from an in-depth knowledge of your target audience/ business/ website's objectives/ competitors. You might want to call it keyword discovery, but we'll go further than that in Part 14: "Are your keywords unlocking doors?"

[notbanksy]

Excellent article, as we have to come to expect from you now, Wizely.
I was unsure about this one when you had your poll, but I'm really glad to have read it now, as I will never write meta data for machines again.

[wizely]

Thanks notbanksy!
I was really unsure about this one when I did the poll (hence why I cheated and wrote the Branding article first!) and, considering you're the only one who's commented on it, I was right! It got the most votes to be written and has had the least response. From now on you get what you're given!
I think it's because the SEO propagandists have got everyone convinced there is some dark art to meta tags and folks aren't ready yet for the concept that people, not search engines should be their focus. It's like SEO as a whole - those who cannot produce quality content dream that there are some magic short cuts to success - it's this mentality that's turned the web into spam city and created a whole industry that thrives on paranoia which SEO 'experts' love to feed.

[BlueDreamer]

This thread seemed to have disappear since notbanksy resurrected it! Obviously this page had no WDFPRSERPSOPTIMISATION

wizely, on Nov 16 2008, 04:05, said:

I think it's because the SEO propagandists have got everyone convinced there is some dark art to meta tags and folks aren't ready yet for the concept that people, not search engines should be their focus. It's like SEO as a whole - those who cannot produce quality content dream that there are some magic short cuts to success - it's this mentality that's turned the web into spam city and created a whole industry that thrives on paranoia which SEO 'experts' love to feed.

It all boils down to writing good copy doesn't it? No real secrets in that!

[wizely]

Hey notbanksy you might like to see how I got Paris, prostitution and cakes into an article that looks at this topic in yet another way! Have a read of SEO, SERPs and Parisian Tarts.

[notbanksy]

wizely, on Nov 18 2008, 16:04, said:

Hey notbanksy you might like to see how I got Paris, prostitution and cakes into an article that looks at this topic in yet another way! Have a read of SEO, SERPs and Parisian Tarts.

Again, more excellent stuff there, sir! I was a little disappointed to not read a more vivid description of the French tarts behind those shutters, but you can't have it all, can you?

Right, off to google French tarts!

[MacDesign]

Very helpful article Wizely. Thanks for sharing and pls continue with your sharing. Even though I am a designer, I feel I should also pay attention to copy.

[wizely]

notbanksy, on Nov 23 2008, 20:21, said:

Again, more excellent stuff there, sir! I was a little disappointed to not read a more vivid description of the French tarts behind those shutters, but you can't have it all, can you?

I would've just ended up drooling o the keyboard! Anyway, haven't you read that articles should only be 250 words and contain no descriptions and preferably everything in bulleted lists!

MacDesign, on Nov 23 2008, 20:44, said:

Very helpful article Wizely. Thanks for sharing and pls continue with your sharing. Even though I am a designer, I feel I should also pay attention to copy.

Good man!

[Scott S]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I've been wondering what the f*** happened to the promised "part 14"?

[Faevilangel]

Scott S, on 04 May 2010 - 06:32 PM, said:

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I've been wondering what the f*** happened to the promised "part 14"?

Forgetful in his old age & way too busy

[wizely]

Cheeky mongooses!
I stopped writing Copy Corner articles because they don't involve Photoshop so they're not for WDF!

[Scott S]

wizely, on 05 May 2010 - 12:01 AM, said:

Cheeky mongooses!
I stopped writing Copy Corner articles because they don't involve Photoshop so they're not for WDF!

lmao!

You can always continue them over on t'other forum if ya like?

Either way, it'd be nice to see them resurrected. Definitely one of the most interesting and thought provoking series of articles I've read on the subject.

[Seth]

Wizely, you truly are smarter than a cheeky pacaderm! Great post as always. What other forum Scott S. Talking about? Or am I reading way too much into something that shouldn't be read into

[wizely]

Cheers Seth!
The forum is: Web Help Forum It's the Huge link in his signature! To be honest I'd totally forgot about it (sorry Scott) and must take a look again.

This post has been edited by wizely: 06 May 2010 - 05:33 AM

[Scott S]

wizely, on 06 May 2010 - 05:32 AM, said:

Cheers Seth!
The forum is: Web Help Forum It's the Huge link in his signature! To be honest I'd totally forgot about it (sorry Scott) and must take a look again.

I'm SO offended! lol

Yes Wizely, you MUST lol. The copywriting section over there is rather bare lol