Still Need to Write Title & Description Tag?
-
My SEO has advised me that Google has stopped using title and description tags for search results and as such, it is no longer necessary to write specific title and description tags.
I see that Yoast seems to pull text to create these tags and sometimes it looks like it reflects the best elements of the content, sometimes it does not.
Should I be asking our SEO team to write dedicated title and description tags or is it best practices to leave it to the Yoast plugin? My SEO is of the opinion that writing these tags is not a productive use of time as Google will serve results based on the user inquiry rather than the content on his tags. It sounds logical but it would be reassuring to receive further confirmation of this.
Thoughts?"
Thanks, Alan -
Not a problem Alan
-
Dear Effect Digital:
Thanks for your very detailed and thorough response. Confirms what I suspected, but with ranking factors in flux great to have this confirmed.
Thanks so much,
Alan
-
Thanks as always!
-
Great response from EffectDigital.
-
It's true that Google no longer necessarily must use Meta descriptions and Title tags, however Google is still pre-disposed to using them if they are written well. Why let Google crawl all your content, let a mechanical brain 'decide' which snippet (or paragraph) to display - when you can still control it with minimal effort?
If Title tags and Meta descriptions are written badly (poor grammar, keyword stuffed) then Google now can take these elements from your content instead. That's a fall-back though, it's not a reason to 'get lazy' and 'not do stuff'
In SEO, there are no 'magic bullet' solutions (that's commonly said, in our industry). But if there are no magic bullet solutions, that means that there are very rarely, any single changes that massively increase results. If that is true, it means that most factors in SEO only hold a very small (yet relatively equal) weighting
If you follow me on that, you'll see why the small 'seemingly unimportant' stuff is still critical. If in SEO, all factors under your control only make up a tiny sliver of the whole pie - then by saying 'I won't do the small stuff' what you are really saying is 'I won't do any SEO'. But these small, seemingly unimportant changes - are all part of what gives you an 'edge'. When you come up against a competitor of relatively equal standing (and popularity), you might just get ahead. That's what SEO is really for
Imagine you have two car manufacturers stripping down and gutting out their cars for the rally track (maybe one is Mitsubishi and one is Subaru). They go around the chassis, making tiny reductions here and there - so that their car finishes the track less than a second faster than the other. That has value to them, but if the team said "well each of these tiny changes doesn't do much, so let's sit on our butts and do nothing" - the opposition WOULD beat them
The art of optimisation is small, consistent, fractional weight loss and streamlining. That's what it means, not just in SEO but everywhere
If you have an SEO company which is hesitant to do their own darn job, look elsewhere. You need someone who just 'gets on with it' instead of taking your money and making excuses when you pull them up on stuff (although budget is also a factor there, since I don't know anything in that area - I at least have to say that for them)
Meta descriptions don't influence Google's rankings any more, but a search result which has a nicely written description may draw more traffic through from Google without having its ranking position increased. If people see it and it looks more attractive, they may choose that result over the top one. Although Google can 'generate' SERP snippets from your content - since when has generated crap ever been better than hand-written, targeted, authored text? Do you let Google Ads write all your own Ad-text for PPC? No? Then don't do it in SEO
Page titles can still influence rankings. Not as strongly as they used to, but I see evidence every day that they can still make the difference in some small situations. That's what optimisation is, bundling up all the small stuff into a package and benefiting from it. Someone who says "this is too small to bother with" ISN'T an optimiser. Optimisation is attention to detail for small, cumulative, multiplicative gains which snowball over time
Too many people are still selling SEO as a pure marketing package instead of a B.I. & fat-trimming / competitive edge based product
Final thoughts: Yes, write your own page titles and Meta - and don't let people fob you off when you're paying them your own real money. They should be coming to you with things they have missed (it does happen, people are human after all) not the other way around with you having to pick up on stuff, go to forums, aggregate answers. You're doing the research now - that they should have done before they even opened their doors. Everything I have said is (EXTREMELY) common SEO knowledge
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I need help in doing Local SEO
Hey guys I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to SEO world and I want to do local SEO for one of my clients. The issue is I do not know how to do Local SEO at all or where to even start. I would appreciate it if anyone could help me or give me an article or a course to learn how to do it. Main question The thing that I want to do is that, I want my website to show up in top 3 google map results for different locations(which there is one actual location). For example I want to show up for
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seopack.org.ofici3
online clothing store in new york
online clothing store in los angeles or... Let's assume that we can ship our product to every other cities. So I hope I could deliver what I mean. I'd appreciate it if you could answer me with practical solutions.0 -
Importance of City in Title?
Anyone doing SEO for a local business ever tried to do an A/B test between city name in title and not in title? Seems that if you have a Google Places for Business Listing and have correct NAP on your web pages, Google places heavy importance already on that when determining geographic relevance in their algo. As a business expands, maybe not that far from their original service area but starts to offer services in other nearby cities some of which may be as big of a population as the city the business is located in, it seems to make less and less sense to put city names in the title if not for the basic reason of making the title too long. But what if your primary area is basically three cities and including them pushed your title to say, 90 characters. How much does city name in the title tag matter when you are already coming up the local 3-pack map listing on search results for the relevant cities?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MrSem1 -
SITEMAP - Does <changefreq>and <image:title>have any apreciable effect?</image:title></changefreq>
Hi everyone. It was hard to find some actual evidence that some of the atributes to be declared in a sitemap have some real impact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Particularly, im interested in these two: <changefreq></changefreq> and**image:title</image:title>** I've used them in a few cases just to check their effect and couldnt see any.
Do you have any experience with these? Or any other atribute that might be helpful, in order to create a more accurate and effective sitemap? Also, this could be a great topic to create a new Moz Blog post, the one about sitemap is 8years old.0 -
URL Re-Writes & HTTPS: Link juice loss from 301s?
Our URLs are not following a lot of the best practices found here: http://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls We have also been waiting to implement HTTPS. I think it might be time to take the plunge on re-writing the URLs and converting to a fully secure site, but I am concerned about ranking dips from the lost link juice from the 301s. Many of our URLs are very old, with a decent amount of quality links. Are we better off leaving as is or taking the plunge?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Should the Title Tag and the H1 Tag not be the same or not anymore and can that be classed as over optimization?
Hi All, I am just evaluating my title tags, H1,H2's etc and wondered in light of the google algorithm changes over the last 12 months , we should look at more diversity as opposed to things possibly looking over optimized... Originally (18 months ago) my Title tags considered of 2/3 keyword phrases , then I reduced this to my keyword phrase | Brand Name but a majority of my H1's and H2's had the same keyword phrases. Historically this has served us very well and rankings for good but over the last 12 months, we were hit by panda, hummingbird etc...and which we are trying to recover from and from what I have read, the rules have changed with regards to good seo./ over optimized SEO. We have been writting unique content , making more of our links branded etc to sort things out from that perspective but on the page stuff is just as important so I would like to get this right. I am now thinking , that I may be getting penalized if my H1 and title's , H2 are the same ? and that they should be obviously related but different. H2's again , need to be related but not the same as either of the above. Is that how things should be these days ? from what I have read about this, most of the articles are not that recent so I don't what to do what is now redundant advice Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Wrong titles in site links
Hello fellow marketers, I have found this weird thing with our website in the organic results. The sitelinks in the SERP shows wrong written text. As in grammatically incorrect text. My question is where does Google get the text from? It is not the page title as we can see it. kKsFv0X.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | auke18101 -
Page Titles of Blog
Hi, Should all the page titles of our blogs include a Keyword(s) and\or our website name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Help needed for a domain
I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM. We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping. In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace. I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections. When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation! To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually. My conclusions are: Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what! The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO. We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time. My actions are: a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request. b) I'm working on the site: Improving internal link building for relevant keywords Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO. Also, I did some redirections that were missing. c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site. d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate! 🙂 I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people! Thanks a lot, MWcEdPa.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodrigofreitas0