The meta title is the clickable headline that appears in search results and in the browser tab. It's should tell both search engines and users what a page covers.

Try Keep it under 60 characters. Google truncates titles that run longer, anything cut off in the SERP costs you context and looks unprofessional. Spaces count toward the limit.

Lead with the topic, end with the brand. Put the most descriptive content first, where it carries the most weight. The site or company name belongs at the end, separated by a hyphen.

Example: SEO Metadata Best Practices - WebSight Design

Include your primary keyword, but only if it's in the page body. Title tags are description of the page, not a place to stuff terms your page doesn't actually cover. Google cross-references the title against the page content. Mismatches are penalized, or if Google feels your title does not properly describe the page, it gets rewritten entirely. One important note for 2026: Google rewrites title tags more aggressively than it used to, particularly when it judges the original title to be too short, too keyword-heavy, or misaligned with the page's actual content. The best defense is writing a title that's accurate, specific, and serves the user, Google is far less likely to override a title that genuinely reflects the page

Write it for the click, not just the crawl. A title that ranks but doesn't get clicked is only doing half its job. Ask yourself, does this the title accurately represent this page and give someone a reason to choose it over the result above and below it?

Meta Description

The meta description is the block of text that appears beneath the title in search results. It doesn't directly influence rankings, but it directly influences click-through rate -- which does influence rankings over time.

Keep it under 160 characters. Google will truncate anything longer, often at an awkward point. Aim for 140-155 to give yourself a reliable buffer across devices.

Describe the page accurately. Google reserves the right to replace your meta description with text pulled directly from the page body if it determines your description is non-descriptive, misleading, or irrelevant to the query. The best way to keep your description is to make it genuinely useful.

Include at least one keyword from the title. Not for stuffing purposes, because it signals topical consistency and Google bolds matching terms in the description when they match the user's query, which draws attention.

Write it like a pitch, not a label. A meta description is marketing copy. It should tell someone what they'll find on the page and give them a reason to click, in plain language. 

Example: A practical guide to writing meta titles, meta descriptions, and structured data that works across search engines, social platforms, and AI-powered answer surfaces.

One consideration that didn't exist a few years ago: AI assistants and answer engines read meta descriptions as a concise summary of what a page contains. A vague or generic description is a missed opportunity to shape how AI systems characterize your content when they surface it to users.

The Keyword Field

Many CMS platforms, including WSD's custom CMS, include a dedicated metadata keywords field. This field was once a primary SEO input; Google stopped using it as a ranking signal years ago and Bing largely ignores it. It has no meaningful impact on search rankings in 2026.

That said, it isn't entirely useless. Some internal site search systems, third-party analytics tools, and content management workflows still reference the keywords field for categorization and filtering. If your CMS includes it, it's worth maintaining for internal organization purposes.

If you're allocating time and attention to metadata, spend it on titles and descriptions, keywords can be a secondary meta information about that page, just don't expect it to move rankings.

Implementation

How metadata gets implemented depends on how your site is built.

For CMS-based sites, the right approach is dedicated metadata fields built into every page template, separate inputs for the title, description, and social metadata, so whoever manages the site can customize each page without touching code.

For WordPress sites, Yoast SEO and All-In-One-SEO are the standard solutions. Both handle title tags, meta descriptions, and social metadata from a single interface with per-page controls.

For large sites with hundreds or thousands of pages, a template-driven approach that auto-generates metadata from existing content (page titles, category names, product data) is often the practical starting point, with manual customization applied to high-priority pages.

The most common metadata problems WSD encounters on audit: titles that were never customized and default to the CMS page name, descriptions that are identical across multiple pages, and social metadata that was never configured at all. None of these are difficult to fix, but all of them are costing sites performance they've already earned.

WebSight Design writes and implements metadata that works across search, social, and AI-powered surfaces. Contact us today to see what your site's metadata is actually doing.