The title of any given webpage, also known as it’s H1 Tag, is the most prominent and, from an SEO standpoint, influential on-page identifier. This should clearly signal the topic or theme of the page and/or reflect the actual name of the page itself.
Crawlers assign a lot of weight to the content of these titles, so it’s very beneficial from an SEO perspective to include keywords that are most relevant to the content on the page and to be as descriptive as possible within the limited character count.
An example of strong H1 tags for our own digital marketing website could be along the lines of “New Jersey Digital Marketing Agency,” “Where’s the Best NJ Marketing Agency,” or “Digital Marketing Agency Helping Brands Scale Their Marketing and Sales Strategies with a Data-First Approach.”
Meta tags are an HTML attribute of a webpage that provide brief descriptions of the content of that page. They’re similar to your H1 tags in terms of the content and the keyword exposure you want to maximize, but because of their higher word count, you can be slightly more descriptive.
Google relies on meta tags as descriptors for the on-page content. Without a meta tag to gall back on, Google has to pull content from the page itself to fill that gap and may not pull in the most relevant information to attract visitors from search results.
Meta tags can be hardcoded into your HTML but most CMS platforms have very simple ways of inputting and updating meta tags without requiring any coding. According to 2019 study by Backlinko, pages with meta descriptions get 6% more clicks than those without.
To continue with our previous example, an example of a strong meta tag that complemented our digital marketing-oriented H1 tag could be: “Get more leads, acquire more customers, and improve your web traffic. As a NJ digital marketing agency, we help with website design and development, content management, and advertising. See why we’re NJ’s #1 SEO agency.”