Overview
The Search Engine Title and Description are shown when someone searches for your website in search engines such as Google and Bing. These are important because this is what consumers see when they search for your website on popular search engines.
SEO Title & Description for Content Pages
As you can see from the above example, the Search Engine Title and Description show up when someone views your web pages in a search engine. The Title is the blue link at the top and the Description is underneath it.
- A good Search Engine Title is around 60 characters in length and should be a very concise explanation of the specific web page in your site.
- Home Page: For the homepage Search Engine Title, Modern Retail recommends putting your store's name first followed by what you do and sell.
- Other Pages: For all other pages/posts in your website, Modern Retail recommends adding your store's name at the end of the Title.
- Search Engine Description includes 2 to 3 sentences that summarizes a specific page in your website. As you can see from the above example you have a limited number of characters to use for your description. While you can write descriptions that are 500 characters or more, Google and other search engines are going to cut you off around 150 characters. Therefore, you will want to be very thoughtful in what you say in these first 150 characters because they will ultimately be what the consumer see when they search for your website.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Modern Retail uses the Yoast SEO plugin making it easy for you to enter and manage your SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions in WordPress. Ideally, you should create a unique Title and Description for every page and post in your website. You can access your pages and posts by clicking on All Posts or All Pages in the WordPress menu.
Once you are editing your Pages or Posts, you will want to scroll down to the WordPress SEO by Yoast section. Within this section you will see the SEO Title and Meta Description fields. Using the above advice you will want to enter in the appropriate Title and Description for the page. You'll notice the Snippet Preview at the top of the page showing you a general idea of what it will look like in Google and Bing.
The SEO Title is a concise summary of the page and the Meta Description is everything you want to say summed up in one paragraph. As you can see from the above example of Modern Retail's homepage SEO fields, we say "Modern Retail" first in both the Title and Description.
However, on all other Pages and Post in the site we use the following:
Page Content + " - Modern Retail"
While not a hard and fast rule, we typically recommend adding your store's name at the end of your Title for all pages but your homepage. One of the reasons why we make this recommendation is because if a consumer is searching for your store's name, they will mostly likely see your homepage in the search results. However, if they are searching for a style, department, brand or designer; they will be viewing an interior page and on these pages it is more important to show the style, department or designer's name before yours. The same can be said for articles your write in your blog and other pages in your website.
Considerations
Here are some things to consider when entering this SEO information:
- The SEO Title can be longer than 60 characters. However, as shown above Google and other search engines will cut you off around 60 characters.
- The Search Engine Description can be longer than 150 characters but again you'll be cut off around 150 characters. This is not to say you shouldn't write Descriptions that are 500 characters or more. You absolutely can and should because the search engines will "use" this information for SEO purposes.
- It is generally accepted that SEO Keywords provide little value. However, you're free to enter them in the Yoast Focus Keyword section.
- You should never repeat SEO Titles and Descriptions. Every page in your website should have an unique Title and Description.