URL Slugs, Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

When a search engine is crawling a website, the page title and meta description are two of the main elements they initially read in order to get an understanding of what any given page on your website is about. More specifically, they are two of the most important ranking factors of a website. Because of this, it is extremely important to make sure page titles and meta descriptions are done correctly. If they’re not done properly it can actually hurt your website more than it helps.

Each individual page on your website can have its own unique URL slug, page title and meta description. To truly set yourself apart from the competition you will want to have a well optimized page title and meta description on each one of your informational, category, brand and product pages. The category and product pages being the more beneficial pages to start out optimizing.

As you keep reading through this section of the guide you will see several examples starting on page….. of well optimized page titles, meta descriptions and URL slugs. Before we do that lets review some helpful tips about optimizing these elements:

Target Keywords: You want your primary targeted keywords to appear as close to the beginning of your page title and meta description as possible. These terms are seen as having more importance by the search engines so this should be the keyword that best describes the page.

Keyword Variation: Within your page titles and meta descriptions, it can be beneficial to include different variations of keywords that people might search for when looking for a specific type of product/service. For example, if you have the keyword ‘basketball shoes’ in your page title, you may want to use ‘basketball sneakers’ in your meta description if you’re finding that they are both quality terms worth targeting. NOTE: There are often times where there are not variations to keywords and only one way to describe a product or service, so you will only use keyword variations if and when possible.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing: While you do want to include multiple variations of keywords, as mentioned in the last bullet point, you want to also make sure that those keywords are relevant to the page you’re using them on. Even if a keyword may be relevant to the website as a whole, if it is not relevant to the specific page it is being used on, it is likely going to negatively impact the effectiveness of your search engine rankings and can lead to a high bounce rate for your website.

Avoid Duplication: Every page on your website should be unique and thus each URL slug, page title and meta description should also be unique. Having duplicate information makes it hard for the search engines to differentiate one page on your website from the next. As a result, having duplicate content can negatively impact how the search engines rank and position your website in search engine results pages, if they rank you at all.

Meta Keywords Tag: You don’t need to worry about optimizing the meta keywords tag as this is not a ranking factor and does not hold any weight with Google or Bing. Search engines such as Google and Bing are looking to see the keywords you have targeted within your page titles, meta descriptions and on page content.

Character Counter: Here is a link to a tool that you can use to help make sure that you are using proper character lengths for the page titles and meta descriptions you write: http://snippetoptimizer.net/google-serp. Take a look at the screenshot of the snippet optimization tool below. Using this tool will generate a preview of how your snippet (page title, URL slug and meta description) would appear in Google, helping you make sure that they’re within the proper character limits. You can also see the character count in the upper right corner of the title and description text box. NOTE: Google limits SERP page titles by pixel width, not by character count, so letters like m and w, will take up more pixel width than an i or an l. Again, this is why it is important to look at the preview of your snippet before you publish it to your website.

Below are some tips and guidelines to follow when creating page URL slugs. Examples of these tips will come in the next section of this guide.

Rule: Can only contain alphanumeric characters, underscores, hyphens, periods, or forward slashes.

Unique: URL slugs must be unique.

Avoid Change: Once a page has been indexed by a search engine, changing that page’s URL slug can remove that page from being indexed and cause you to lose the rankings for that page that you worked so hard to get. That page will now have to be re-indexed. NOTE: If you have an existing website and are moving that website to a new platform, you will want to make sure to transfer the URL slugs from the existing site to the new one that will be replacing it.

Length: No character limits, but it is recommended to try to keep them under 100 characters.

Lower Case: It is recommended that your URL slugs are written using only lower case letters.

Separate Words: If the slug is more than one word long, you want to use hyphens (-) to separate the words.

Separate Categories: For sub-category URL slugs you use a forward slash (/) to separate one category level from the next.

Below are some tips and guidelines to follow when writing page titles. Examples of these tips will come in the next section of this guide.

Unique: Every page on your website should have a unique page title.

Target Keyword: You want your primary targeted keyword to appear as close to the beginning of your page title as possible.

Length: Page titles should not exceed 60 characters in length. Page titles that exceed this length will be cut off with an ellipsis (…) on the search engine result page. The information past the character limit will not be read by search engines, thus providing no benefit to your website. Remember to use the snippet optimizer tool (http://snippetoptimizer.net/google-serp/) mentioned above to make sure that your page titles are within the proper character limits.

Consistency: Because the search engines want to see consistency, the targeted keywords used in the page title should also be found within the content description on the page.

Proper Case: Capitalize the first letter of each proper word.

Your Brand: Unless you are a well-recognized brand, such as Nike or Adidas, you should not include your businesses name in the Page Title as it will not add value.

Below are some tips and guidelines to follow when writing meta descriptions. Examples of these tips will come in the next section of this guide.

Target Keyword: You want your primary targeted keyword to appear as close to the beginning of your page title as possible.

Unique: Every page on your website should have a unique meta description.

Q&A: When writing a meta description you generally start out by asking a question and then providing the solution. 

Length: Meta Descriptions should not exceed 156 characters in length. Titles that exceed this length will be cut off with an ellipsis (…). The information past the character limit will not be read by the search engines, thus providing no benefit to your website. Remember to use the snippet optimizer tool (http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html) mentioned above to make sure that you’re within the proper character limits.

Consistency: Because the search engines want to see consistency, the targeted keywords used in the meta description should also be found within the content description on the page.

Product Meta Descriptions: Are essentially condensed versions of your product description where you want to highlight the most relevant information that a customer would look for when searching for the given type of product. Say you sell basketball shoes for example. Within the meta description you might highlight that they’re high-top, lightweight, breathable, ankle supportive and so forth. Again with a 156 character limit, you only have a limited amount of space to work with for a meta description and you can’t list all the features, so you will want to select the ones that have the most relevancy with regards to what people search for when trying to find a product or service online. Identifying those terms will come with the keyword research you do. See Examples Below.

Category Meta Descriptions: Give you an overview of the category as a whole and the different sub-categories that are nested under it. As you get down to the lower level sub-categories your meta description will be more focused on that specific sub-category. You will want to use your researched keywords to highlight the most relevant information that a customer would look for when searching for the given type of product category. See Examples Below.

Brand Meta Descriptions: give you an overview of the types of products that you offer on your site from that brand. See Examples Below.

CATEGORY EXAMPLES

Below are several examples of URL slugs, page titles and meta descriptions for categories, from a top level parent category down to a lower level sub-sub-sub category. For these hypothetical examples, we are going to say the name of our website is Warhead Sports and we offer athletic sportswear and equipment. These examples will focus on the Footwear department.

PRODUCT EXAMPLE //

Continuing to use Warhead Sports as our example, we will now look at an example of a URL slug, page title and meta description for a product. This product example will focus on a pair of basketball shoes.

BRAND EXAMPLE //

Below is an example of a URL slug, page title and meta description for a brand. This example will focus on the brand Nike.