Meta Description

Hello,

I've been experiencing an ongoing challenge with my Meta titles, and I'm reaching out for some guidance.

Despite my attempts to fix the issue by removing and re-adding the titles, they continue to appear incorrectly on the SERP. The titles are also correctly formatted in the Squarespace backend.

I've attached a few screenshots.

Any recommendations on how to resolve the issue would be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks!

Hi @Katey001 - I feel your frustration here! I've been here too.

I've added some possible solutions below, but sometimes this can take time.

• Ensure your SEO titles are 50-60 characters long - this is optimal for displaying on search engines - I have added a video at the bottom which should help.
• Make sure the rest of your page follows SEO best practices - ensure you're following an SEO checklist across the rest of your page so it's easy for Google to crawl your website and display you correctly
• Backlinks - backlinks are links from other websites, they increase your domain authority - a score of how reputable your site is on Google. If you don't have many backlinks, Google is less likely to take your site seriously and crawl it more often. Get high-quality backlinks, and Google is more likely to be kind here.
• Optimize your SEO description (meta description) - this should be 150-160 characters long and include the main keyword you want to rank for.
• Internal links: adding internal links from other web pages to this one, indicates to Google that this is an important page, and boosts the likelihood it'll display correctly. This is called "page hierarchy"
• Requested indexing - have you submitted your sitemap to Google Search Console and manually requested indexing? This can really help. I've added a video guide below to connecting Google Search Console to Google. 

Google does not use the TITLE tag to show the listings in Google like it did before. This is something that has been going on, from memory about 18 months now. If you read Googles Webmasters blog you will find a post detailing this. Do not expect to be able to define what comes out in the SERPS. This change is most likely driven to give more visibility stand-out appearance to the Advertising blocks on the page, where keywords are inserted.

Meta description: very difficult. Generally and historically Google would sniff a page for the keyword in the user's search query and then show a text snippet around that text. This happens to a lesser extent now. Microsoft used to be very good at using the meta-description.

Meta-description length does not have to be within the realms of 150-160 characters long because, there is no direct correlation between the listing and the meta-description because of previous paragraph. The 150-160 character rule was set because it was the length of the available space in a Google underneath the SERPS.  It really had very little to do with SEO as a ranking mechanism, but it was easy and so most tools recommended this for that purpose.

Therefore you can quite happily ignore this constraint knowing that at least you have more words you can insert into a meta-description to have at least keyword presence and the ability to have some kind of control over it, instead of Google sniffing your page and randomly pulling out text it thinks will support the search query.

Good luck.