Write titles and links people can use

The result is an offer made in one glance

Google calls the clickable headline of a result the title link and says it is often the primary piece of information people use to decide which result to click.^[1] The snippet beneath it, the description or summary, does the second half of the persuading.^[2] Together they decide whether the work you did on the page ever gets a visit. Both are mostly generated from your page, which means the way to improve them is to improve the page and then make its signals unambiguous.

The same logic runs inside the site. A link is an offer too: its text tells a reader, and the crawler, what they will find if they follow it. The rest of this chapter covers the three parts in turn.

Write the title as one clear promise

Google’s guidance on titles is short and specific. Give every page a <title> element. Make it descriptive and concise, and avoid vague labels such as “Home” or “Profile.” There is no length limit, but the title link is truncated to fit the device width, so put the important words first. Avoid keyword stuffing and boilerplate that repeats across pages. Brand the title briefly, with the site name at the start or end after a delimiter. Make it clear which text is the main title: Google also draws on the first visible heading and other large, prominent text.^[1]

It lists the sources it may use to build a title link: the title element, the main visual title, heading elements, the og:title tag, other prominent text, anchor text on the page and links pointing to it, and WebSite structured data.^[1] That list explains a common surprise. When the title element is empty, stale or inaccurate, Google uses another source, and what appears in results may differ from what you wrote. Its own examples include a half-empty title such as “| Site Name,” an obsolete one that still says “2020 admissions criteria” above a visible heading saying 2021, and one that does not describe the page.^[1] A rewrite is a signal that your title and your page disagree.

A useful working pattern is a specific topic or job, then the distinguishing detail, then the brand: “Hamstring strain: recovery stages and when to see a physio – Northside Physio.” Check the result in a few weeks. Google needs to recrawl and reprocess the page to notice changes to these sources, which can take from a few days to a few weeks.^[1]

Let the snippet come from the page

Snippets are created automatically from the page content, and they are designed to preview the part of the page that best relates to the particular search, so Google can show a different snippet for different searches. Google sometimes uses the meta description instead, when it judges that to describe the page better than the content does.^[2] There is no length limit, but the snippet is truncated to fit the device width.^[2]

Two practical consequences follow. Write a unique meta description for each page, as a short pitch that tells a searcher what the page is and why it fits, because that is the text Google may choose. And write the first paragraph so it could stand alone as a snippet, because for many searches that is what will be shown. The meta keywords tag, by contrast, is not used by Google Search.^[3]

You can control snippets when you need to. The nosnippet robots rule prevents a snippet, and max-snippet sets a maximum length.^[2] Use them for content you do not want previewed, not as a routine setting, because a restricted snippet also restricts what a searcher sees before clicking.

Write links that make sense on their own

Google’s linking guidance asks for crawlable links, meaning an <a> element with a resolvable href, and for anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant both to the page it sits on and to the page it links to. It offers a simple test. Read the anchor text out of context, and if you cannot tell what the page is about, it needs more description.^[4] Generic anchors such as “click here” and “read more” fail the test. So do links chained together with no words between them, and anchor text so long it becomes a sentence.^[4]

This is also an accessibility requirement and not only an SEO nicety. WCAG success criterion 2.4.4, Link Purpose (in context), asks that the purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone or with its surrounding context. Screen readers can list all the links on a page, where “read more” repeated ten times is meaningless.^[5] If a link is an image, its alt text becomes the anchor text for Google.^[4] Do not stuff anchors with keywords either. Google’s guidance says that if it feels like you are forcing keywords into the anchor text, it is probably too much.^[4]

Link where the next question arises

The best internal link sits in the sentence where a reader’s question changes. After a paragraph explaining what sports massage treats, the natural next question is whether to see a physio instead, and that sentence links to the comparison. Navigation menus and footers help people find the main sections, but they cannot carry this kind of contextual link. Google’s guidance says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site, and that there is no magic number of links per page. If you think it is too many, it probably is.^[4]

It also notes that linking out is fine: citing sources and linking to other sites can help establish trustworthiness, as long as you give readers context for what they will find.^[4] When you do not want to vouch for a link, such as one in user-generated content, mark it with the appropriate rel value. The starter guide covers nofollow and related annotations.^[3] The next chapter, Connect the library around real decisions, extends this from single links to a whole site.

Diagnose a weak result carefully

Search Console reports CTR as clicks divided by impressions, and average position as the position of the topmost result from your site.^[6] A page with many impressions and a low CTR is a candidate for a better title and snippet, but the number alone does not tell you why. Work through the possible causes before editing.

Change one thing at a time, note the date, and compare the same query and page over equal periods a few weeks apart. Google’s starter guide advises waiting a few weeks before judging a change.^[3] Seasonality and ranking shifts can swamp a title effect, so a rise or fall after an edit is a hint, not a proof.

Apply it to your website

• Every page has a unique title element that names the topic specifically, with a short brand suffix.
• The title, the h1 and the first paragraph describe the same page in compatible words.
• No title is empty, stale, stuffed with variants or repeated across pages.
• Each key page has its own meta description written as a pitch, and the first paragraph can stand alone as a snippet.
• Internal links use real anchor elements with descriptive text that makes sense read alone.
• Every page you care about is linked from at least one other page, in context.
• Title or snippet changes are logged with a date and compared like for like after a few weeks.