A search result is a title line with a description beneath it. It is one of the few surfaces a marketer can edit directly, so it attracts attention — but the two elements do different jobs, and not knowing the difference means spending effort in the wrong place.
The title does two things at once
The title tag is the clearest signal of what a page is about, and it is also the line a human clicks. One sentence serving both machine and reader — write for only one of them and you get half a title.
The practical rule is simple: put the load-bearing words first. Titles are truncated often, and the cut-off is governed by display width rather than a character count, so it shifts with language and script. Memorising “keep it under N characters” is less useful than making sure the opening still makes sense on its own. Put the brand at the end, and give every page its own title — ten pages sharing one title leave both the search engine and the reader guessing which to open.
When your title is not the one shown
Search engines rewrite titles when they judge it helpful. Most people have noticed at some point that the result line differs from the title on the page. This is normal behaviour rather than a fault, and it usually happens when the title you wrote sits awkwardly against the query.
The response is a review, not a complaint. Look at the queries the page actually appears for; if those words and your title are pulling in different directions, change the title. The customer’s vocabulary is the reference, not your internal one.
The description does not rank you
Stuffing keywords into the meta description is a habit that has outlived its reason: the description is not used to decide rankings. That does not make it pointless — it influences which of the visible results gets clicked. Treat it as space for the click rather than space for the ranking and you write it differently.
A good description says in one sentence what the reader gets by opening the page. Leave it blank and the search engine lifts a sentence from your content, which is not always bad but has no particular reason to beat a sentence you chose. Descriptions are also frequently regenerated from the page depending on the query — which is why writing a strong opening paragraph matters as much as writing the tag.
Where you actually edit this in WordPress
A single SEO plugin lets you set the title and description per page and define default templates per post type. One error is worth watching for: the site name appearing twice. If the brand is in the template and also typed into individual titles, the result line spends two slots saying your name. Looking at one real result before publishing catches almost all of these.
Designing titles and descriptions by page type continues in the SEO archive, and tidying a whole site’s title system is part of the technical review in our optimization program.
Next part
With titles sorted, the next question is what to show and what to hold back. The next part covers sitemaps and robots.txt — and the key point is that they are not opposites.