If someone were to ask me, “If I were to do only one thing to SEO my website, what would you suggest”, I would, of course, respond “There is not just one thing that you can do that will magically optimize your website to get higher search engine rankings, but….”. If you were to do one thing TODAY to your website to improve your SEO, I would suggest optimizing your page titles and descriptions.

Your page titles and descriptions tell both the search engines, as well as users, what a particular page in your website is about. Therefore, you want to make sure that the page titles and descriptions are unique and relevant  to each page of your website. They should also be descriptive, and include the targeted keywords you have chosen for that page.

Guidelines for Optimizing Page Titles:

• Make sure that each page has a unique title and description. If the name of your website is “John’s Widgets”, don’t use the same title for each page. An example of a unique title would be: “SEO Blog Widgets | John’s Widgets”.
• Keep page titles short and descriptive. Try to keep page titles around 64 characters or less to avoid getting cut off in the Search Engine Results.
• Use targeted keywords as close to the beginning of the title as you can.
• Avoid using “stop words” like “a”, “and”, “to”, “with”, etc. Instead, to separate information, use characters such as the pipe | or hyphen -.
• Do not stuff keywords into your title. Although you do want to use the main keywords chosen for that page, an example of keyword stuffing in a page title would be: “SEO Widgets, Blog Widgets, Widgets Resources, SEO Blog Widgets”.
• Use page titles that will attract the attention of your target searcher. Page titles are used for more than just search engine results, so make sure that your title makes someone want to click on it.

Now that you have your page titles optimized, it is time to look at the page descriptions. The page descriptions should be a brief summary of the content on your page to let the search engines as well as users know what your page is about.

Guidelines for Optimizing Page Descriptions:

• Summarize the content of the page without using generic copy. The summary should accurately describe the page content.
• Keep page descriptions between 100 and 255 characters to avoid being cut off in the Search Engine Results.
• Utilize your targeted keywords with the most important ones being placed at the beginning of the page description. Google bolds keyword queries  in both your page title and description.
• Use a call-to-action, and any other branding or marketing copy relevant to the page that will entice the user to click on your listing.

By following these guidelines for optimizing your page titles and descriptions for SEO, you will definitely be on your way to improving your website SEO.

Do you have any additional tips for optimizing page titles and descriptions? Let us know!