Page title and meta description: what to write for search

A page title should name that page’s topic in its first few words, change from one page to the next and leave the brand for the end, kept short. The description is a summary written for each page, with the facts that help someone decide to click. Both are a request, not an order: Google builds the result on its own and swaps the text when it finds a problem (Google Search Central, title links). Its guidance sets no character count, but the result gets cut to fit the screen. That’s why the part that matters goes first.

What these two pieces of text do

The title lives in the <title> element, inside the page’s <head>. The description lives in the <meta name="description"> tag. Neither shows up in the body of the page, and they do their work outside it. The title becomes the link in the search result and the name of the browser tab, and the description may become the summary right below.

According to Google Search Central, the title link is often the main piece of information people use to choose which result to click.

The Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) calls this information scent. It’s the estimate people make of a page’s value before opening it, based on the link label and what surrounds it (Raluca Budiu, NN/g). On a results page, the label is the title and the surroundings are the description. The post on link labels covers the same idea inside a site.

The choice tends to be quick. In an analysis of 377 searches tracked with eyetracking, people looked at a single result and nothing else in 20% of them (Feifei Liu, NN/g). In 2006, that share was 17%, according to the same article.

Where Google gets the title from

It’s all automated. The title link documentation lists the sources it weighs:

the text in the <title> element;
the main visible title and the headings, like the <h1>;
the og:title tag, the one that feeds shared link previews;
large text that stands out through styling;
the text of links pointing to the page;
WebSite structured data.

The same page explains when Google replaces the title you wrote:

Half-empty title, with the site name and nothing about the topic.
Outdated title, with an old date while the visible title already shows the new one.
Title that doesn’t match what the page offers.
Repeated text across many pages, with no way to tell them apart.
Two headings with the same weight, and no clear main one.
Different language or script from the main text.

The change isn’t instant either. Google has to crawl and process the page again, which can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks (Google Search Central).

How to write the title

Topic first. NN/g recommends moving the words that matter to the front and cutting anything nonessential (Hoa Loranger and Jakob Nielsen, NN/g). People scanning the list read the start of each line.
One title per page. Google gives the example of a store that calls every page “Cheap products for sale”. Nobody can tell one page from another that way.
Don’t promise more than the page delivers. An inflated title gets the click, but it spends trust you’ll need next time (NN/g, information scent).
Don’t repeat terms. The same word in several forms makes the result look spammy, to the search engine and to the reader (Google).
Short brand, at the start or the end. Set the site name apart with a colon, hyphen or pipe. The home page has room for a phrase about the site, but on other pages it turns into repetition (Google).
Same language as the page. A page in English calls for a title in English. If the language doesn’t match, Google may pick other text (Google).
One main title on screen. The <h1> should stand out from everything else and say the same thing as the <title>, so Google isn’t stuck between two candidates (Google).

How to write the description

The summary in the result almost always comes from the page content itself. Google uses the meta description when it describes the page better than the text does (Google Search Central, meta descriptions). Since it looks for the passage that best fits each search, one page can get different summaries depending on what was typed.

It’s still worth writing one. The same documentation shows the way:

One description for each page. The general site description belongs on the home page and on pages that gather other pages. If you can’t do them all, start with the most visited ones.
Facts, not just a sentence. A blog post can include the author and date. A product page can pull together price and manufacturer, which were scattered across the screen.
Generated by the system when the site is large. In a huge catalog, writing by hand is impossible, and building the description from each page’s data is encouraged. It just needs to be readable and varied.
Never a list of keywords. Loose terms in a row say little and are less likely to be shown.

If you want to limit the summary, there are three controls. The nosnippet rule blocks it, max-snippet sets a maximum length and the data-nosnippet attribute hides part of the page (Google). The post on AI answer engines picks up from here, for when that passage ends up inside a generated answer.

The site name is a separate piece

Above the link, Google shows the site name. It applies to the whole domain, while the title link belongs to each page (Google Search Central, site names). To state your preferred name, the home page declares WebSite structured data, a block of code made for the search engine to read. The name should be short, well known and the same across the home page.

The two pieces work together. When the title repeats the name the result already shows, Google may drop the name from the title link (Google).

The title also serves accessibility

Success criterion 2.4.2 of WCAG 2.2, the web accessibility standard published by the W3C, asks for pages with titles that describe their topic or purpose (W3C, WCAG 2.2). It’s level A, the most basic tier.

The page that explains the criterion says the browser shows the title in the tab or the window bar. It helps people with visual disabilities who keep several pages open, and people with cognitive or reading disabilities. In a single-page app, where the screen changes without a new address, the title has to change with it.

What I do on my own sites

On the sites I’ve built, titles follow three patterns, one for each kind of page:

Product home page, no brand. On Vexor, the title is “Custom assistant that answers, reminds and organizes”. The description says what the assistant does and that it’s delivered in parts.
Agency home page, brand up front. On Tamires Brito’s site (in Portuguese), the title starts with her name and goes on with “Agência de UGC e criadores de conteúdo para marcas”, meaning UGC agency and content creators for brands. UGC stands for user-generated content, here recorded by creators for the brand to use.
Inner page, brand at the end. On kahue.net, every case study follows the pattern “Vexor case study: AI assistant on WhatsApp | KAHUE”. The home page declares KAHUE as the site name in WebSite, and blog posts carry only their title.

On the blog, a script checks every post before it goes live. It fails a title outside 50 to 60 characters and a description over 160. That’s my own rule, tighter than NN/g’s, and not something Google requires. In practice, it pushes the whole topic to the front and leaves little room for filler. The same title goes into the link preview through the og:title tag.

None of these sites has published click data. The three patterns are examples of how the guidance gets applied, not proof of results.

Where the sources disagree

Length is the clearest gap. NN/g puts page titles at 40 to 60 characters (NN/g). Google gives no number and says the cut follows the device width (Google). The way I read it, they don’t clash: NN/g’s range is a writing guide, and Google’s cut is what happens on each person’s screen.

The other gap is between search and social media. NN/g warns that a good title for search doesn’t always work on social media, where the immediate click counts more (NN/g). Google, on the other hand, reads the og:title tag, built for social sharing, as one of the sources for the title link (Google). If you use a different title in each place, make sure both describe the same page.

The common mistake: fill it in once and forget it

The common mistake is treating the title and description as a field in the site theme, filled in on day one and copied to every page. Since the description doesn’t appear on the page, nobody notices when it goes stale or matches all the others, and Google itself points out that risk. What you get is a list of identical links, which the search engine rewrites its own way. Writing both along with each new page, and revisiting them when the page changes, avoids the problem.