Titles and Meta Descriptions for International SEO
Titles and meta descriptions are two very important parts of your website’s optimization. They’re part of what’s necessary to rank in search engines, and are the first things searchers see from your site when they look at the search results. When you’re creating these for your website, they need to be short and sweet, attention grabbing descriptions of who you are and what you do. What they shouldn’t be are tags simply stuffed with keywords.
Keep these tips in mind when creating the titles and metas for your international websites (or even your one at home):
• Be unique! You don’t want duplicate content on your pages, so you don’t want duplicate titles or meta descriptions either. Your website tools may be able to tell you which pages have duplicate titles and meta descriptions.
• Create new tags if necessary! Google doesn’t penalize translated content as duplicate content, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to have the exact same content on your websites targeting different regions and customer bases. The same goes for your titles and meta descriptions. Double check them to see if your title tags work translated or if you need to create language or region-specific tags. There may be other constraints to consider as well, such as character limits, depending on what search engines you’re trying to gain visibility in.
• Short and sweet. Don’t create long titles or descriptions that will get cut off with “…” in the results pages. Again, pay attention to character or word limits. Google in the US often limits titles to 65 or 70 characters and meta descriptions to 160.
• Brand yourself! Don’t forget to include your company name. You want to put yourself out there. Our team’s suggestion is that your company name goes at the end of the title tag, saving the room at the front for your keywords and message.
• Make it your page’s header, too! Putting your title tag (or a very close variation) as the H1, or header, or the page is a good practice. This will often be the first thing visitors to your page see, so you want them to know that the page they land on is they page they think they clicked on in the search results. Tell your visitors right away you have the information they want.
Again, titles and meta descriptions are what appear in the search results, so you want to grab searchers’ attentions and encourage them to click on your page, even if you’re not the top result. What are some of your experiences in writing titles or meta descriptions for your international sites?
