Do you think you know everything about meta titles and descriptions? I have some tips for you.
Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
Patrick Stox had a great Twitter thread with uncommon knowledge about meta titles and descriptions.
It was so amazing that I had to share the highlights with you.
Did you know that many top ranking websites don’t have meta descriptions, and often Google doesn’t use your provided meta description?
An Ahrefs study found that 25% of top-ranking pages don’t have a meta description, and Google uses different text that the meta description 62.78% of the time.
Side note: This doesn’t surprise me as I work on large authoritative websites that rank just fine and get a decent click-through from SERPs without meta descriptions. In the grand scheme of things in a technical SEO audit, I’ve personally deprioritized filling in meta descriptions for those types of sites.
Here are few more not well-known tips:
- Snippets shift between mobile and desktop.
- Page titles and meta descriptions are used in image search. Google’s documentation highlights that page titles and descriptions are used to generate a title and snippet for image search.
- If your pages is indexed, but your title is empty sometimes the title shown in the search snippet is from the anchor text of links TO that page.
- If you have a .pdf with no title, then the title is sometimes pulled from the .pdf filename. Note: This is why I recommend that many of my clients start optimizing their .pdf files.
- Search snippets can be pulled from the content of the page, not your meta description.
- “data-nosnippet” – can be used on the span, div, and section elements to prevent Google from using content within those sections for your search snippet. And apparently, Dan Pearson discovered that you could use “data-nosnippet” on all of your paragraphs and force google to show your meta-description.
- Featured snippets add a parameter to the URLs, which is called “scroll to text fragment.” It looks like #:~:text= with some added text on the end of the URL. When the user clicks, it takes the user to that specific text on the page and highlights it. You can track clicks to these in Google Analytics by setting them up as a custom dimension via Google Tag Manager.
So those are your meta title and descriptions tips for the day!
Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
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