Title, description and headings:what really matters

Why these three elements belong together

Title, description and headings all three do the same thing: they tell you what is on the page. The title does that for the search engine and for the search result, the description for the person scanning the results, the headings for somebody who is already on the page and for every system that has to process your text. They are the cheapest work in this whole guide. An afternoon for a site of twenty pages and no developer needed. The mistakes can be seen with the naked eye.

The title: 10 to 65 characters

The title sits in the <title> tag and appears as the blue clickable line in the search result. It is the only element in this chapter that is generally accepted to weigh directly on your position.

The limit of 65 characters is a rule of thumb and not a hard limit from Google. What Google actually applies is a width in pixels, not a number of characters. A title with many wide letters gets cut off sooner than a title with narrow letters. The exact width is not officially documented and changes now and then. 65 characters is the workable approximation: below that you stay within view almost always.

The lower limit of 10 characters is there for another reason. A title that only contains "Home" or "Services" says nothing about the subject. For the search engine that is a missed opportunity and for the reader it is no reason to click.

What works in practice:

• Put the subject at the front and the brand name at the back. Whatever gets cut off, gets cut off on the right.
• One title per page, never the same one twice on the whole site.
• Write the words your customer uses, not your internal designation.
• Do not stack keywords. A title made up of five terms with dashes between them is read by nobody.

Google rewrites titles regularly and then shows something other than what you entered, for example an H1 from the page or a name from your navigation. That is normal behaviour and not a punishment. The chance of it drops when your title is short, matches the content and is not the same on every page.

The description: not a ranking factor and important all the same

The meta description is the grey text under the search result. Google has been saying publicly for years that this text is not a ranking signal. So you do not write it to get higher. You write it because it decides whether somebody clicks on your result or on the competitor's.

That distinction makes most of the advice on this subject worthless. Stuffing keywords into the description yields no position. Google does put the words matching the search in bold in the result and that draws attention. It is a presentation effect and not a ranking.

The limits of 50 and 160 characters each have their reason. Under 50 characters there is too little there to convince anyone. Above 160 the end of your sentence falls away. If that end happened to hold your argument, you have thrown it away. Here too the real limit lies in pixels and Google cuts off differently on mobile and on desktop. Write your most important words at the front and that uncertainty will not bother you.

Google often replaces the description with a passage from the page itself, when that fits the search better. That is useful behaviour. It also means you should not put much energy into it beyond one good sentence per page. Anyone who wants to steer how much text Google may show uses the robots meta from chapter 1.

One description per page and never reuse the same text. A site where all twenty pages carry the same description gives the visitor no reason at all to pick one over the other.

Exactly one H1

The H1 is the title of the content, visible on the page itself. It ought to say what the page is about, in plain language. Usually it resembles the title tag without the brand name.

One H1 per page is our rule. Multiple H1s bring no punishment from Google and the HTML standard technically allows them. The problem is a different one: two H1s mean in practice that the page has two subjects or that the logo is marked up as a heading or that a theme has not thought the structure through. In all three cases the page becomes less clear for the reader and for every system that reads out the structure.

For GEO this weighs more heavily than for classic SEO. A language model that wants to take a passage from your page uses the headings as a map of the document. See chapter 6.

A heading hierarchy without gaps

After the H1 come H2s for the main parts and H3s for the subdivisions within them. An H3 that does not hang under an H2 is a gap. That happens above all when somebody picks a heading level based on how big the text looks.

The rule is simple. Pick the level based on the place in the structure and handle the size with CSS. A heading is a level, not a font size.

A second rule that yields more than it costs: write headings as an answer or as a question, not as a label. "Prices" says less than "What does an ERP project cost". Somebody who scans finds what they are looking for faster. An answer engine looking for a passage recognises at once which part belongs to which question.

The thresholds in one place

These are working thresholds, not laws of nature. They are chosen so that you can check them in five minutes per page and so that you sit on the right side of the cut-off.

The mistakes that come back most often

From the sites we review the same six keep coming up. They are listed here in the order of how often we see them.

1. The same title on every page, usually just the company name. Google can then tell no page apart from another and shows something else of its own.
2. An empty or missing description. Google then makes up a fragment. Sometimes that is fine and sometimes it is your cookie notice.
3. The logo as H1. The most important heading of every page is then your company name instead of the subject.
4. Headings picked by size. A page that jumps from H1 to H4 and back to H2 has no readable structure.
5. Titles that consist of keywords. Something like "ERP software Antwerp ERP implementation ERP advice". That has not worked for a long time and it costs clicks.
6. Images without alt text. The quickest gain in this list and at the same time the most neglected one.

What you do not have to do here: calculate keyword density, repeat every keyword in every heading or keep a fixed ratio between text and headings. Those are pieces of advice from an era that is over.

What you can do yourself and what you cannot

To do yourself, without a developer:

• Write titles and descriptions and check them for length. Every SEO plugin shows the number of characters while you type.
• Review the heading structure of a page. In Chrome you open the source code with Ctrl+U and search for <h1, <h2 and <h3.
• Fill in alt texts. Describe what can be seen, in one sentence, without the words image of.
• Track down duplicate titles in the performance report of Search Console, where pages with the same title visibly get in each other's way.

What you need help with:

• A theme that hard-codes the H1 onto the logo.
• A page builder that generates headings as styling instead of as a level.
• Title templates for a webshop with hundreds of products, where you do not write every title by hand.

The ratio between effort and result is more favourable here than with almost everything else in this guide. Count on five minutes per page.

Would you rather not do this yourself: SEMANU carries out the full SEO and GEO audit for 1,450 euro, report and working session included. What it covers is on the guide page.