Writing Titles and Meta Descriptions

The title and description are the only part of your page most people ever see. They are what appears in the search results, and they decide whether anyone clicks. They are also the two things beginners most often get factually wrong, because a lot of widely repeated advice about them is not what Google actually says.

What these two things are

When your page appears in Google, the listing has a blue clickable line and a couple of lines of grey text beneath it. Google calls the first one the title link and the second the snippet.

You influence them with two pieces of HTML that live in the page's <head> and are never visible on the page itself:

• The <title> element: the main source for the title link, and also what shows in the browser tab.
• The <meta name="description"> tag: a summary Google may use for the snippet.

Note the word "may". This is the part that surprises people.

Google rewrites both, and that is normal

Google does not always use what you wrote. It generates the title link from several sources (your <title>, the main heading on the page, other text on the page, even the words other sites use when linking to you) and picks whichever it judges best describes the page for that particular search.

Snippets are rewritten even more often, and for a good reason: the snippet is generated per search. The same page shown for two different queries can get two different snippets, each pulling the passage that matches what was asked. Your description is one input, not the final text.

This has a practical consequence worth internalising. Your description is not a ranking factor. Google has said so plainly and for years. It earns its keep by making the listing worth clicking, and that is the entire job.

Two more things widely stated as rules are not Google's position. Google publishes no character limit for either tag: the familiar "155 characters" is where results tend to get visually cut off on a given screen, not a rule anyone enforces. And there is no requirement that your search term appear in the description. If you want the listing itself to carry more than these two lines (a rating, a price, a breadcrumb trail), that is structured data, not a longer description.

What to do

• Give every page a unique title and description. Duplicates across a site are the most common real problem, and the easiest to fix.
• Write the title for someone who has never seen your site. "Opening Hours" is meaningless in a list of ten results; "Opening Hours | Sunrise Bakery, Tehran" is not.
• Put the distinctive words first. Long titles get cut off from the end, so a title that starts with your brand name buries the useful part.
• Make the description describe this page accurately, and give a reason to click: what the reader gets.
• Never copy your description from the page's opening sentence out of habit. That sentence was written to sit under a heading that already gave context; read cold in a search result it often explains nothing.

Common mistakes

Counting characters instead of reading the result. A description padded to hit 155 characters is worse than a clear one at 90.

Stuffing search terms in. "Bread, fresh bread, bakery bread, buy bread" is the kind of text Google's spam policies describe, and it reads as untrustworthy to the human deciding whether to click.

Assuming a rewritten title means something is broken. It usually means Google found a phrasing that fits the query better. If it happens constantly, treat it as feedback that your title is vague or duplicated.

Sources: Influencing your title links and Control your snippets in search results.