Eight SEO essentials for beginners: Page titles and descriptions

SEO involves so many tasks that it can feel overwhelming. If you do not know where to start, work through my eight essentials. Getting these basics right gives you a foundation to build on. This article focuses on page titles and descriptions, two important elements of how your pages are presented in search.

What are page titles and descriptions?

Each page can have a title and a meta description. In the source code, they look like this:

<title>Page title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description">

These small pieces of code are easy to overlook, but they deserve attention in your SEO work. They do not normally appear as text within the page body. Search engines may use them to create the title link and descriptive snippet people see on the search results page, or SERP.^[1][2]

A clear title helps communicate what a page is about, while a useful description gives people a reason to click. They play different roles: the meta description itself is not a direct Google ranking factor, and Google may generate a different title or snippet.^[3]

How to write useful titles and descriptions

Use the following checklist:

1. Keep the length practical. A common working range is about 25–30 Chinese characters, or 50–60 English characters, for a title; and about 65–80 Chinese characters, or 130–160 English characters, for a description. Treat these as drafting guidelines, not official fixed limits. Make the wording fit the page and the available display space.
2. Include the target keyword naturally. This is the search term you want the page to compete for. Do not choose only the most popular terms, or assign the same broad industry keyword to every page. Give each page a clear target. Mention it in the title and, where it fits naturally, the description. Repetition should never make the wording awkward.
3. Match the content closely. The title and description should accurately express what visitors will find. Do not force keywords into a promise the page does not fulfil; misleading wording can undermine relevance and trust.
4. Avoid duplicates across the site. Different pages should have different titles and descriptions, making their purposes and content clearly distinguishable.
5. Highlight the most useful information. When possible, bring out the page’s strongest detail or benefit. It can help people decide to click and communicate the substance of the content.

Website platforms such as 91APP, SHOPLINE and Shopify, as well as WordPress setups with suitable SEO tools, usually provide fields for titles and descriptions. Find those fields and write the copy. If an agency built a custom website, this basic capability may already exist; if it does not, ask the developer to add it.

Sources and references

1. Influencing your title links in search results — Google Search Central

   The title element supplies a page title, but Google may generate its title link from other text and truncate it to fit the display.

2. Control your snippets in search results — Google Search Central

   Google may use a meta description, but often generates a query-specific snippet from page content instead.

3. Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking — Google Search Central · 2009-09-21

   Google explicitly distinguishes meta descriptions used for snippets from ranking: the description tag itself is not used for ranking.