Mastering SEO Basics: Optimizing Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Social Previews

Today marks a significant step in improving SEO fundamentals—optimizing page titles, adding meta descriptions, and configuring social previews. These elements are essential for boosting your website's visibility in search engines and ensuring that your content looks great when shared on social media.

Let’s begin with page titles. In search results, the title is the most visible aspect of your page, serving as its primary headline. To maximize its effectiveness, make sure your titles are descriptive yet concise, aiming for a maximum of around 70 characters. A well-crafted title helps your content stand out in search results and attracts more clicks.

Consistency is also key. Try to maintain a pattern across similar pages, ensuring each title reflects its specific content while adhering to a logical structure. For instance:

• Season 1 | Your Awesome Movie | Movie Theater
• Season 2 | Your Awesome Movie | Movie Theater

Including your website's name in each title is a great practice, but for the homepage, you can go a step further. Add extra details that communicate the essence of your brand or offerings since a short site name might not convey enough information.

In addition to titles, adding meta descriptions plays a crucial role in search engine optimization. These brief summaries appear under the title in search results, providing a snapshot of what the page is about. Crafting a compelling meta description encourages users to click on your page.

Now onto social previews: configuring how your pages appear when shared on platforms like Facebook (og:..) and Twitter (sorry the X, marked in meta tags twitter:) enhances the click-through rate. Make sure your title, description, and image appear correctly and are engaging enough to prompt social users to visit your site.

Here is a code examples of the settings:

<title>Season 1 | Your Awesome Movie | Movie Theater</title>
<meta name="description" content="Lorem ipsum..">
<meta property="og:title" content="Season 1 | Your Awesome Movie | Movie Theater">
<meta property="og:description" content="Lorem ipsum..">
<meta property="twitter:title" content="Season 1 | Your Awesome Movie | Movie Theater">
<meta property="twitter:description" content="Lorem ipsum..">

In TYPO3, optimizing for SEO is straightforward thanks to the SEO extension. It allows you to easily fill in fields for page titles and meta descriptions directly in the page settings. You can also upload images for social previews, making it simple to control how your content appears on social platforms.

And here’s a little reason to celebrate—our SEO efforts are already paying off! After just a few days, the site is now live in Google Search, and we’re seeing the first clicks coming in. It’s a small victory, but it’s only the beginning of this exciting journey.