Marketing3 min read
How to Check SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions for Free
The title and description are what people read in search results before deciding whether to click. Here is how to check what your pages are actually saying.
KLYRO TeamPublished
Every page carries a short set of tags that describe it: a title, a description, a canonical address, instructions for search engines, and a block for how it should look when somebody shares the link.
None of it is visible on the page itself, which is why it goes stale. A page can be rewritten three times while its description still describes the version from two years ago.
The tags that matter
- Page title. The blue line in a search result and the text in a browser tab. The single most important tag on the page.
- Meta description. The grey sentence underneath. It has no direct effect on ranking and a large effect on whether people click.
- Canonical URL. Tells search engines which address is the real one when the same content is reachable at several.
- Meta robots. Instructions about indexing. A stray
noindexleft over from a staging site is the classic way a page disappears. - Open Graph and Twitter tags. What the link looks like when it is pasted into a message, a post or a chat.
- Language and viewport. Small tags with outsized consequences on phones and in non-English markets.
How to check a page
Enter a page, not just the domain
Metadata is per page. The homepage tells you very little about the state of your product pages.
Read the list
Each tag is shown with what was found and how long it is, or marked missing. Nothing is scored.
Check the pages that earn something
Your highest-traffic pages, and the ones you actually want people to land on. That is usually a much shorter list than you expect.
What good looks like
A title of roughly 50 to 60 characters. Search engines cut it off past that, so put the words that matter first. Every page needs its own; the same title on forty pages tells nobody anything.
A description of roughly 140 to 160 characters. Write it as a sentence to a person, not a list of keywords. It is an advert, and the only one you get to write for free.
A canonical that points at itself. On a normal page, the canonical should be the page's own clean address. If it points somewhere else, be sure that is deliberate.
The social tags are worth ten minutes
When somebody pastes your link into a message, the preview that appears is built from the Open Graph tags. Without an image, it is a bare line of text that nobody clicks. It is one tag, and it takes longer to argue about than to add.
Common mistakes
- A `noindex` left behind after launch. Check it the day you go live and again a week later.
- One description reused across the site. Search engines will ignore it and write their own, and theirs will be worse.
- Titles that start with the company name. "Klyro Digital | Pricing" wastes the part people read first. Put the page first.
- A canonical pointing at the homepage. It tells search engines the page is a duplicate of the homepage, and they will act on that.
- Keyword stuffing the description. It does not help ranking and it reads badly to the person deciding whether to click.
Questions
- How long should a title tag be?
- Around 50 to 60 characters is the practical range. Longer is not penalised, it is simply cut off in the search result, so anything past that is written for nobody.
- Does the meta description affect ranking?
- Not directly. It affects how many people click your result, which matters plenty on its own.
- Why does Google show something different from my description?
- Search engines rewrite descriptions when they think a passage from the page answers the query better. A clear, specific description makes that less likely.