Recommended Syntax for HTML meta title and description?

0
votes

So I'm just starting to use dynamic meta data for my websites. I've been told that adding a different meta title and description per page is strongly recommended.

What is the correct way to do this?

Should it be something like this:

Home page title meta -> My Website Name
Home page desc meta  -> Summary of my website.

Different page title meta -> Page name
Different page desc meta  -> Description of current page.

As well as that, is there a recommended naming convention for the title?

e.g.

Home page title mega      -> My Website Name
Different page title mega -> My Website Name | Page Name

or

Home page title mega      -> My Website Name
Different page title mega -> Page Name

I assume there's a standard for this rather than whatever the developer decides is best. Any ideas/suggestions?

2
htmlmetadatameta-tagsmeta
it's absolutely up to you. Just be careful bcs Google doesn't like when you put tons of keywords in the description. Be modest. - MightyPork
@MightyPork So having the website name in each page title has no effect on things like SEO? Because my personal preference is not to have it on every page. - user3420034
It's up to you. SEO works a lot differently today than it did 5 years ago. Google doesn't care much about your description, keywords, etc much anymore. It's more about the content and media of your pages. - cport1
I think that's okay. Descriptions should be unique, but adding some " :: MyBlog.com" part to the title is fine, everyone does that - MightyPork

2 Answers

1
votes

title

(Note that the title element is not a "meta title".)

HTML5 defines that the title element should identify documents "even when they are used out of context". So for a typical website, you should always include the site name in the title.

For usability reasons, it’s most of the time a good idea to specify the page name before the site name (e.g., page name – site name).

HTML5 doesn’t recommend a delimiter for separating the page name from the title.

meta-description

HTML5 defines that the description metadata name is used to "describe the page". The value must be "appropriate for use in a directory of pages, e.g. in a search engine".

As the homepage typically represents the whole site, it’s appropriate to describe the site (instead of the page) in the homepage’s meta-description.

1
votes

At first I would recommend to sign in to the Google Webmaster Tools. There you sign in your website and get a lot of information and resources to improve the information structure of your website.

Here you have an article from Google about the topic: Meta tags that Google understands

About the meta name="description" element:

<meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />

This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results.

About the title element:

<title>The Title of the Page</title>

While technically not a meta tag, this tag is often used together with the "description". The contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results (and of course in the user's browser).

Also think about implementing structured data, see schema.org.

I think it is important these days to have a web standards based, clean and semantically rich HTML markup for your whole page.