Meta tags play a crucial role in SEO, the title and description put in the head section of the HTML is referred to as the meta tags usually by Digital marketers, apart from these there are many other meta sections for Bots and browsers but webmaster treat them differently, but these all fall under the same category of meta, below are few details for your reference.

• Meta includes information about the HTML version
• Instructions to browsers & Bots such as
  • Language information
  • Index/not to index
  • Canonical
  • Syndication
  • Location and few others

This article mainly focused on explaining the title and description which appears on Google search results page.

About Meta tags:

• Meta tags are the HTML tags used in the head section of the HTML and which usually are served as information to search engines and browsers.
• Meta tags play a crucial role in improving the Click through rate (CTR)
• Meta tags are the summary of your complete webpage to both user and bots

Instructions in writing the Meta tags

1. Start title with the highest volume & high intent business keyword

This is one of the highest priority things and should be compulsorily taken care and any wrong optimization doesn’t reap any benefits.

Eg: lets take this offline, lets assume you have a bakery and you have so many products to be sold, and assume there is a school in front of your school which has at least 10,000 students studying there and now of this 10,000 there are at least 8000 students who like ice-creams, 1500 like chocolates and 500 like puffs and now what kind of product you would put in the storefront or showcase in order to attract majority of students?

Case 1: You would put all three on showcase but with a priority order as Puffs, Chocolates, and Ice-creams

In this case, you can attract most of the Puff lovers and a small percentage of the Chocolate and ice cream lovers, and that would be something like this,

500 (Puff lovers)+ 5% (Chocolate lovers)+ 5% (Icecream lovers)

500+45+400= 945

Case 2: You have put all three in the storefront but in a priority order of Ice-creams, Chocolates and puffs

In this case, you can attract most of the ice-cream lovers and a small percentage of Chocolate and puff lovers, and that would be something like this,

8000 (Ice cream)+5% (Chocolate)+ 5% (Puffs)

8000+45+25=8070

so similarly, if you are using the highest searched variation in the first place in your title, there are high chances of more visitors coming to your website.

To make it clear there were three products taken in the example (case1 & 2), but when it comes to optimizing web pages we will be dealing with one single product/service which is been queried in multiple ways and we should prioritize the most used one always.

Keyword	Search Volume
Pmp Training	100000
PMP Certification	50000
PMP Course	1000

In this case I would consider writing my title starting with PMP Training, even though there is enough space to fit in all the three variations I still use the PMP training in the first because the latter part might get truncated with the improper delimiter usage or sentence breakdown or somehow users would not pay more attention to the terms succeeding the first few words/characters.

2. The title should be around 70 characters

The title used to have only 516 pixels of space and would not show any content that’s beyond its pixel limit and the anything below these 70 characters should fit in.

3. The first alphabet of all the words in the title should always be in the upper case

From grammar perspective that’s how it has to be and if your titles and descriptions built-in templates you have to be very concerned about what’s happening there in the title

4. Brand mention in the title is not required if the brand is not big (not well known)

You can take the advantage of your brand if there are lots of offline campaigns such as TV ads, Radio ads, newspaper ads, hoarding, billboard and more are happening regularly. When the same people see your brand on the Google search results there are high chances of they visiting your webpage since they have heard of your brand a lot already.

5. Use either Hyphen, Colon or pipeline in the title and avoid special characters (“| Pipeline”, “: Colon”, “. Full Stop”)

The mentioned characters don’t take too much of pixel space when compared to other special characters and this typically gives some more room to the key terms that play a crucial role in attracting the users

6. The title should use the first 2-3 patterns compulsorily

Sample Shortlisted Keywords:

• mobile phones online
• mobile phones prices
• online shopping mobile
• mobile store
• smartphone price
• buy mobile online
• online mobile purchase
• cell phone prices

E.G: Title: Buy Mobile Phones Online in India @ Best Price: Smartphones shopping

7. The same applies for description too, keep the character count to 170 and if it’s beyond that it’s still fine.

8. Use one call to action in the description you write eg: Enroll now, Register Today!, Browse

9. Use one or two call out statements

Call out statements are something those typically let the user in decision making, these can be called as USP’s (unique selling points). call out statements usually focus on stressing why to buy that product, why to buy from us, how is it better than other products/providers and more of that kind.

Worth to product/service, and worth to brand are conveyed here.

10. Use special symbols to attract customers/Improve CTR, eg: Quality Guaranteed (Check Mark), Refund Available, ( Code for tick/check mark in the HTML is- &#00004)

11. Make sure that rich snippets are implemented for your webpage

Since rich snippets have become part of the description and play a crucial role in CTR there is so much of necessity of its implementation

12. Have full Stops at the required places.

13. Limit the use of special characters in the Title & Description

14. You can mention the brand name in the description.

15. Make sure the description you write should be of very high quality, no grammatical mistakes. If required get it to proofread from the content writers before they go live on the website.