Use the snippet preview added by the WordPress SEO plugin:
This preview will automatically take the values you’ve already filled in in your blog post and apply them to your template, but you can also override the title completely using the title field just below it:
The input will show a warning below it if your title is becoming too long. The title length is not a fixed amount of characters but rather limited to the length of the display in the search results.
For titles the following things are important:
- They should always contain your brand, preferably at the end, so people may recognise you in consecutive searches.
- They should always contain the keyword you think is most important for the current post or page, which we’ll call the focus keyword from now on. The focus keyword should preferably be at the beginning of the title.
- The rest of the title should entice people to click.
optimise your descriptions
Now that we’ve got proper titles, we should start to focus on meta descriptions. The meta description can be used by search engines to show in the snippet, it’s the black piece of text shown beneath the URL. The meta description is usually only used when it contains the keyword the searcher was searching for.
Some plugins, most specifically the All in One SEO plugin, use so called “automated descriptions”. They use the first sentence of a post to fill the meta description by default. That’s not very smart. That first sentence might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject.
Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you’re thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet… If you don’t use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.
Auto generating a snippet is a “shortcut”, and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).
So, use the meta description field you find in the WordPress SEO plugin to write a meta description. Make sure it entices the reader to click through and make sure that it contains the focus keyword of your post or page at least once.
You’ll notice we do not mention meta keywords. We don’t use them and neither should you, for an explanation, read this article by Joost:
meta keywords and why I don’t use them.
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