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Meta titles and descriptions

Meta titles and descriptions are the title and summary of a web page that show in search result listings. They help search engines understand what is on the page and users to find what they are looking for. AI tools may also use them to provide summaries of your content to users or determine what your content is about.

Meta titles

Meta titles should be:

  • front loaded with the most relevant information at the start
  • descriptive of what’s on the page
  • written in sentence case

Do not use vague titles such as ‘Home’ or ‘Welcome’. These do not give the user much information.

Use a pipe | (vertical bar) in title tags to separate elements of the title.

Meta titles get truncated after around 60 characters in search listings. Keep this in mind as longer titles may get cut off in awkward places.

Meta descriptions

A meta description is a short description of a page that you need to provide in the code. Often they appear beneath page listings in search results but sometimes search engines can rewrite them or take content directly from the page if it seems more relevant.

For Google, meta descriptions are not a ranking factor. For the Bing index, they are a ranking factor. For both, they can help users using various tools to find content and decide if it is likely to meet their needs.

ChatGPT uses meta descriptions to determine relevance and we know users are using it and other large language model tools more.

The first paragraph of either the body copy of the page or journal overview is often suitable for the meta description.

Meta descriptions should:

  • be clear and descriptive about what’s on the page
  • include the most important information at the beginning, on smaller screens the description may get cut off
  • contain keywords that might help people find what they’re looking for
  • avoid simply listing or repeating keywords (keyword stuffing)

Example

Meta title:

Journals by subject | BMC Journals

Meta description:

Explore BMC's open access journals by subject to find the best journal for your research and stay current with the latest scientific advancements.

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