What is a meta title? It’s a meta tag that located as a link on search engine result pages, that uses the webpage title, plus normally a secondary keyword and brandname. Often it’s starts using the h1 tag’s keyword, since that’s the best descriptive keyword to use already, the hard work is already done. Now the rest many SEOs will argue about, however, from experience, secondary keywords or locational keywords and ending with a brandname is a winning recipe. Depending on the niche, will determine the usage of a secondary keyword or locational.
Meta titles are one of the most important keyword ranking factors in SEO, and in digital marketing. It’s one of the largest, free, personalized textual billboards a company will ever get, and depending on the website’s SEO, it can be a billboard on a busy freeway or located on a backroad less traveled. Website traffic doesn’t just flow when you use advertising platforms, often organic will always out perform advertising costs, simply because it can get in front of more eyes when the SEO is right.
When Meta Titles Need SEO
Websites can grow to be easily more than 200 pages, if it’s an eCommerce site, webpages can grow to the thousands. That’s why the meta titles can go unnoticed, and end up harming a website’s overall keyword ranking. Dropping the amount of keywords a website ranks for, slowly until the faulty meta titles are corrected. And if a CMS is being used, a badly written meta title template can prevent a website from ever ranking. It’s important to make sure that the meta title isn’t exactly the same as the h1 tag, which should be the page title on a webpage.
Think of SEO like a recipe, without the right amount of certain ingredients, SEO just doesn’t work as it should. The parts that were correct will work, making the SEO seem like it works, only to stagnant. Good SEO will continuously work, and well crafted meta titles will rarely need to be touched, not should they. Since if incorrect meta titles are added to the website in replace of good meta titles, keywords will drop and recovery will take longer, since website ranking is such a dynamic factor, if competitors are doing better SEO now than before, outranking won’t be as easy.
Meta Titles Are For Users And SearchBots
Meta titles are just for users to be enticed and click on, they also need to be well crafted to send the right SEO signals to Google in order to rank keywords better when searched. It’s a very delicate balance to maintain since you want to give your users all the information they need to make a choice. However, searchbots aren’t always as smart as the users and more clear information is needed in certain orders. Only experience will help guide decisions in this case, since it’s not always an easy choice and there is a character limit.
So it’s very important to make sure both the user and searchbots are being thought about, when any SEO factors are in question. There are a few factors that some will claim are SEO, like meta descriptions, when even Google has come out and said, that meta descriptions are more for marketing purposes than SEO, searchbots don’t really utilize them for keyword ranking, Indirectly, if user retention was improved optimization of meta descriptions could assist SEO factors. There is a lot of indirect and direct connections in SEO so attention to detail is important.
If you feel your website may have an issue with meta titles.