What is a Meta Title? Definition & How to Write for SEO

Staff Writer
Last Updated
February 9, 2024
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With more brands and businesses looking to expand their reach and visibility by creating official websites and blogs, it’s slowly becoming much harder to stand out against the oversaturation of online content. In case you didn’t know, these businesses utilize various search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to increase their chances of getting a higher ranking on results pages.

SEO implements and executes a wide range of strategies and tactics to deliver the best results to their clients, and a popular method often used by SEO professionals is to create eye-catching meta titles that immediately catch the attention of users.

What is a Meta Title?

A meta title, also referred to as a page title, is the text displayed when your website appears on search engine results pages. The meta title has two main goals—to communicate to search engine algorithms the topic and content of your web page and to give users an idea of what they can expect when they click on your link.

It’s important to note that the meta title is one of the many ways that search engines determine the relevance of your content to a user’s search query, making it crucial to craft a good one that incorporates different target keywords and phrases. 

And whether your meta title is interesting enough or not will determine whether users will click on your page or not, significantly affecting your website’s performance and engagement.

How to Write an Optimized Meta Title?

When you’re looking to write a meta title that has been optimized for search engines, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind:

Aim for the Optimal Length

The length of your page title should range anywhere from 55 to 65 characters, including spaces, as search engines like Google tend to cut off the characters that don’t fit within that limit, which can negatively affect the number of clicks your website receives.

Include Keywords

The meta title should also contain the most important keywords based on the content and topic of your webpage, making sure that these are included naturally. By performing some keyword research beforehand, you’ll be able to find the most popular and competitive queries for the topic to add.

With that being said, make sure to avoid the excessive inclusion of keywords in your page title—also known as keyword stuffing—as this can negatively affect how search engines perceive your website. It’s also best to put the most important keyword at the start of the meta title, which can be viewed favorably by search engines.

Check For Typos and Other Errors

Not only do mistakes make your brand look less professional and credible, but they can also be detrimental to your search engine ranking. Page titles with errors can compromise user experience by eliciting feelings of confusion, as well as how search engines understand your content and gauge its relevance to a user’s search query. These oversights can signal lower quality and trustworthiness to online algorithms, which can cause your ranking to plummet. 

Make It Interesting For Users

Don’t forget that the meta title is as much for the users as it is for the search engine algorithms. It’s important that you craft a meta title that gives users a concise but comprehensive idea of what your webpage contains, as well as why it may be relevant to them. It’s also worth making the effort to create a title that is appealing to users, which can boost the number of clicks your page will receive.

Never Leave It Empty

For websites that don’t have a good enough meta title—or any at all—search engines like Google will create a title for your website based on what it understands from the page’s content, and this might not be the best thing for the ranking and performance of your website, especially as there’s no guarantee of this automatically generated title being good. 

Page titles can fail to meet Google’s quality standards for a wide range of reasons such as meta titles being too long, too generic, too overfilled with keywords, and more, all of which can lead to Google automatically creating a meta title for you.

The Takeaway

Aside from giving your readers a glimpse of what they can expect from your webpage, meta titles also play a crucial role in how well you rank on search engine results pages by communicating the topic and relevance of your content. 

By improving your meta titles, you’ll be able to increase your chances of landing a favorable spot on results pages, which can lead to increased reach and visibility, as well as better organic traffic and engagement.

Many SEO agencies offer various services to help you craft the right page titles for your website. If you’re looking to have your website audited for page title optimization, then reach out to us to get started! Our SEO consultant in Singapore will be able to draft and create an optimized meta title for each page on your website to help improve your site’s overall performance! 

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