The terms product title and meta description can be intimidating.

You don’t have a degree in computer science or ecommerce, so how are you supposed to effectively maintain these crucial aspects of your website?

Easy, get comfortable, and prepare to improve your online traffic with these 8 tips to crafting great product titles and meta descriptions.

Product Titles

What is a product title? The answer may seem self-explanatory; it’s just the name of whatever item you’re trying to sell, right?

Yes, however, things get tricky when you consider the fact that you are actually writing these labels to appeal to website crawling bots as opposed to human users.

As a result, there are certain factors you have to consider as you compose each title:

Focus On Clarity

There’s a delicate balance between being clear and verbose or kitschy. Remember that the objective of your product title is to match user searches as closely as possible, so web bots suggest your site before others.

This means that you should avoid branded words; if your ecommerce store sells an umbrella, call it an umbrella.

Don’t title the product something seemingly fun like “water bubble” or “rain screen” that nobody online is shopping to find. Title your products as what they are.

On the other hand, be conscientious of the details you include in your product title. Only include the most important aspects of your item, and save less crucial details for product description pages.

Watch Your Character Count

While platforms like Amazon have various limits, you should ideally keep your product titles below 60 characters.

According to Google’s “Product Data Specifications,” 70 characters should be the absolute ceiling. Working with such tight restrictions can be frustrating, but it forces you to prioritize only the most valuable keywords as you write your product descriptions.

How do you know which keywords will perform best? Try adjusting your product descriptions one element at a time and recording how the adjustments affect your data.

With some trial and error, you’ll discover the phrases that appeal best to your target market. Keep a change log, and writing product titles will begin to feel like more of a science than a mystic art.

Avoid Expiring Keywords

As an ecommerce rule, avoid using words like “new” or “sale” that will expire in your product descriptions.

No product will be new forever, and even after you edit your title, its original URL still exists.

Search engines have logged it away in indexing, and changing the URL could cost you broken links and diminished domain authority. The best way to correct this mistake is not to make it in the first place.

Note that this recommendation does not apply to product titles being applied to listings on sites like craigslist or ebay.

Users on theses types of platforms often use “new” as a search term, so including it in your item’s label will likely boost its visibility.

Formatting

According to Amazon’s product title recommendations, you should:

• Capitalize first letter of each word
• Spell out measurements (Ounce, Inch, Pound)
• All numbers should be numerals (5 not “five”)
• Avoid using all CAPS or special symbols (*,!,?, etc.)
• Ampersands (&) should not be used in titles unless they are part of the products brand name. Otherwise, “and” should be written out in lowercase letters

You want your titles to be eye-catching, but you don’t want to be tacky or mistaken for spam. Let the quality of your labels sell your product page, not the formatting of your text.

Meta Descriptions

In contrast to product titles which must account for bots and SEO ranking factors, meta descriptions matter to real-live people.

These people are taking to the internet to solve problems, and they are probably in a hurry. To catch users’ attention and earn their clicks, make sure your meta descriptions do these things well.

Limit your characters.

People have short attention spans, and the internet moves fast. There is simply no time for you to ask users to read a novel of a meta description.

When it’s your page against the rest, you have to be short, sweet, and to the point; otherwise, kiss those clicks goodbye.

Anything over 300 characters is automatically going to be truncated by search engines, so even if you’ve written the most glorious description known to man, nobody will see it; it’ll be reduced to an ellipsis.

Plus, you’ve probably lost your viewers’ interests long before 300 characters. Instead, keep your descriptions trimmed down to about 150 characters if possible.

Describe, don’t stuff keywords.

While you aren’t drafting meta descriptions to suit the needs of bots, keywords within your text that match user searches will appear in bold, making your site an appealing option.

Incorporating terms you expect online shoppers to search will earn you higher traffic, but beware of keyword stuffing!

Reusing the same words over and over again in your meta descriptions may make your overall site seem suspicious to search engines. Try to be creative in the way you engage users looking

Do not copy and paste.

Amongst other useful snippets of advice, Moz explains why it’s a bad idea to copy and paste the same meta descriptions to all of your similar ecommerce pages.

By duplicating content, you risk having SERP results that appear identical and make your site look like it lacks credibility.

If you want to boost traffic to your site, invest time into writing rich descriptions.

Sell your site.

Ultimately, the most important thing to note as you work on meta descriptions is that each one acts as an advertisement for your site.

You have seconds to convince search engine users to pick your content over alternative options, and these 150 characters are your tools!

If you approach writing your meta descriptions as if it’s a necessary chore, you may miss the opportunity to snatch clicks from pages ranking above you in the search results.

Get excited about what you say to people, and think about the pages you select online. What sorts of things influence you positively/ negatively in those decisions?

In conclusion, it is possible to master the art of writing product titles and meta descriptions. You just have to dedicate some time to research and start with following our 8 steps for driving traffic to your ecommerce site.

For more detailed information about these topics, consult this thorough post by Search Engine Watch, “How to Write Meta Descriptions for SEO (Good and Bad Examples).”

Need a more personal form of assistance? Contact us at Tekli for a website audit and a game plan to tackle your product titles and meta descriptions one step at a time.