SEO tags for pages

The title tag is one of the most crucial on-page SEO elements for a website page. It appears as the clickable "headline" where the page appears in search results, and it helps both search engines and visitors understand the main topic of the page.

Key considerations:

• Keep the length of the title tag between 50-60 characters
• While you can enter up to 100 characters, search engines may truncate long title tags and not show all the text
• Use keywords that accurately describe the contents of the website page, placing the most important keywords at the beginning
• Consider including your brand at the end of the title tag, e.g. Organic Coffee Beans - Home Roasted - The Coffee Club
• When including your brand at the end of title tags, apply this consistently throughout your website
• Every title tag on your website must be unique

Best practices:

• Avoid keyword stuffing, as overusing keywords will make the title look spammy and this could harm both your rankings and CTR
• Use action-oriented language to encourage visitors to click on the headline when they see it
• Think about what a visitor might be searching for when they see your page in results and try to match your title tag to their search terms
• Including numbers or offers in title tags, e.g. 50% Off Organic Coffee Beans - The Coffee Club, can often perform better
• Regularly review and iterate your title tags

The meta description is a short summary of a website page that appears below the title tag in search results. It provides search engines and visitors with a concise overview of the page’s content, helping visitors decide whether to click through to your website.

Key considerations:

• Keep the length of the meta description between 150-160 characters
• If the description is too long, search engines may truncate it, cutting off important information
• Make the description informative, clear, and relevant to the page content
• Include important keywords naturally, as they may appear in bold when they match a user’s search query
• Every meta description on your website must be unique

Best practices:

• Avoid writing descriptions that are overly generic or vague
• Use action-oriented language to prompt visitors to click, e.g. Explore our range of organic coffee beans and discover your next favourite brew
• Address common questions or needs directly, e.g. Looking for organic coffee? Browse our premium collection with free delivery on all orders
• Highlight special offers, USPs (unique selling points), or benefits to stand out, e.g. Free delivery on orders over £30! Try The Coffee Club’s freshly roasted beans today
• Test and optimise your meta descriptions by monitoring CTR for each page
• Avoid keyword stuffing. Instead, focus on writing naturally for both users and search engines
• Write meta descriptions for visitors first and foremost — search engines may rewrite them if they aren’t clear or relevant to the page

The page URL is the website address of a page on your website. It plays an important role in both search engine optimisation and user experience. A well-structured URL helps search engines understand the content of the page and makes it easier for visitors to navigate your website.

Key considerations:

• Keep URLs short and concise
• Avoid unnecessarily long URLs as they can look cluttered and be harder to share
• Use keywords relevant to the page content to improve its visibility in search results
• Separate words with hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) as search engines recognise hyphens as word separators
• Use lowercase letters only
• Ensure every page on your website has a unique URL

Best practices:

• Make URLs descriptive and easy to understand, e.g. /freshly-roasted-coffee clearly describes the content of the page
• Remove stop words (e.g. “and,” “the,” “of”) unless they are critical to understanding the page
• Avoid stuffing keywords, e.g. /coffee-coffee-coffee-beans looks spammy and unprofessional
• Update old or poorly structured URLs carefully to avoid breaking links—use 301 redirects to point old URLs to new ones

The meta keywords tag was historically used to list relevant keywords for a page to help search engines understand its content. However, major search engines like Google no longer use this tag as a ranking factor due to its misuse for keyword stuffing.

While you can still add meta keywords to your pages, they have minimal to no impact on SEO today. It’s better to focus on optimising your title tag, meta description, and page content for keywords naturally.

To prevent a website page from appearing in search engine results, enable the add the noindex tag to this page option.

When enabled, this setting inserts the following meta tag into the page's <head> section:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

If the page is already indexed, it will be removed the next time the search engine crawls it. The timing of this depends on how often the search engine revisits the page.

When you change any of these properties on your ShopWired account, the updates are applied instantly and will be immediately visible on your website.

However, Google (and other search engines) won't immediately pick up your changes:

• Before Google can see your new settings, they'll need to crawl your website
• Google doesn't crawl every page on your website every day, and not multiple times a day
• Some pages are not crawled very often, particularly if content on the page doesn't change very often (i.e. when Google last crawled the page there were no changes since the last time)
• Once Google has crawled the page, it then takes some time to update its search results

On average, it can take between 5-10 days for Google to update your website page's appearance in search results with the new tags.

Google (and other search engines) occasionally replace the title tag or meta description you’ve set for a page on your website. This behaviour is expected and driven by Google’s algorithm, which may decide that the provided content is not optimal for the search query or the user experience.

You may find that Google completely ignores your title tag or meta description for a particular search term, but then uses your title tag or meta description on another search term. Google's algorithm has complete control over this, and you aren't able to mandate that Google uses the values that you have configured.

Google's John Mueller explains:

"In general, when we run across titles that appear to be sub-optimal, we may choose to rewrite them in the search results. This could happen when the titles are particularly short, shared across large parts of your site, or appear to be mostly a collection of keywords. One thing you can do to help prevent this is to make sure that your titles and descriptions are relevant, unique, and compelling, without being 'stuffed' with too much boilerplate text across your site."

Google looks for title tags that meet these criteria:

1. Relatively short: Avoid overly long titles that may be truncated in search results
2. A good description of the page: Clearly summarise the content of the page while being unique and relevant
3. Relevant to the search query: Ensure your title aligns with the user’s search intent

Google may also ignore the meta description you’ve set and generate one dynamically. To minimise this, follow these best practices:

• Ensure every page on your site has a unique meta description
• Clearly differentiate the descriptions for different pages
• Include specific facts in the description when relevant (e.g., the author’s name for a book or a product’s key feature)
• Write meta descriptions that are descriptive, engaging, and relevant to the page content

Google prioritises providing the best experience for users and may override your meta description if it feels a different snippet from your page better matches the search query.

We recommend reading Google’s advice on optimising page titles and meta descriptions: Google's Webmaster Guidelines.