In our last entry, we discussed how to make your content SEO-friendly. Another crucial part of this is the Meta Data of your page/blog post.

So what is Meta Data?

Broadly speaking, Meta Data is data that provides information about other data. Website Meta Data is used for an increasingly broad range of functions, but two Meta Fields, the Meta Title and Meta Description, are very important fields for SEO.

If you haven’t noticed them, next time you log in to your WordPress back-end, edit a page or blog post and scroll down underneath your main content. You’ll see two fields that look something like this…

When we build your site, we fill out these fields for all of the pages of your website. But if you add a new page in the future, you’ll want to fill them out too. Here are some tips…

The Meta Title

The Meta Title field is very important for SEO. In terms of your content, it’s probably the single most important element to consider.

It needs to feature the words you want the site to rank for, that also feature in your content, starting with the most important first. However, it should also still read like a sentence. If it appears spammy (the same word/words repeated over and over) it can have an adverse effect on your rankings.

It should not exceed 70 characters, or it risks being truncated (or even completely rewritten) by Google.

The Meta Description

The Meta Description field is less important for search engines. Filling it out is more about encouraging people to click on your link. When you do a Google search, the meta description is the snippet of black text underneath the blue title.

An engaging description can help get more traffic to your site, even if it doesn’t carry much weight itself. It should be no more than 140 characters in length or it will get truncated.