Web writing mistakes: 'We'll leave that bit to the IT guys'

A frequent error in web writing, as pointed out by this excellent (again) article from Webcredible, written by one of my favourite experts, Nick Usborne.

Every bit of 'written' content on your site is important and this includes the page title and meta description. Here, you're putting up your hand and showing the searcher/reader/potential customer that you are there, and that your site content is relevant to what they are looking for. I have been misled countless times by poor titles and descriptions appearing in search engine results. Indeed, sometimes they don't appear at all, because the webmaster/web team have left that bit to the programmer, who forgot to add it or figured it was not important, or added something that just won't do.


These elements are important and the point made by the article highlights one of my favourite topics: page title and meta descriptions help BOTH of your main content targets. They help your readers/customers AND they help the search engines - too many websites concentrate on one or the other of these; very few consider both human and 'non-human' users when writing content.