Tell Search Engines What Each Page of Your Actor Website Is About
Until now your whole site shared one search title and one description. Every page of your actor website can now have its own, written by you, in a field on the page itself.
What these two fields actually are
When your page appears in a search result, two pieces of text do the work. The blue clickable line is the title tag. The gray paragraph underneath is the meta description. Neither appears on your page. Both decide whether somebody clicks.
Search engines will write both for you if you leave them empty, by guessing from your content. The guess is usually mediocre and occasionally embarrassing, which is the argument for spending two minutes per page.
How to write a title tag
Around 55 to 60 characters. Lead with the thing somebody would type, then your name.
- Weak: Home
- Weak: Welcome to my website
- Better: Jane Okafor | Actor, London and Manchester
- Better: Showreel | Jane Okafor, Screen and Stage Actor
Include the market you work in if you want local searches to find you, because "actor" alone is a search nobody wins and "actor Manchester" is one you might.
How to write a description
Around 150 characters, written as a sentence to a human rather than a list of keywords. It is your one chance to say why the click is worth it.
For a reel page: Two minutes of recent screen work from Jane Okafor, including drama, comedy and commercial credits. Available on request in full.
Stuffing it with repeated phrases does nothing for ranking and reads badly to the person deciding whether to click, which is the only thing that actually matters here.
Which pages deserve the effort
Not all of them, honestly. In order:
- Your home page. This is the one that ranks for your name.
- Your reel or video page.
- Your resume or credits page.
- Any page about a specific skill or service you want to be found for.
Your privacy page does not need a hand-written description. Spend the time where the traffic is.
This is one piece of a larger picture
Titles and descriptions influence clicks more than rankings. What influences rankings is the site being fast, readable on a phone, actually about something, and linked to from elsewhere. We have written about the whole picture in optimizing an actor website for search engines and in making your site easy to find.
The social equivalent of this feature is control over how your site looks when shared, which is next. Further out we want to handle the parts you should not have to think about at all: canonical URLs on every page and automatic sitemaps.
Do this now
Open your home page settings and write those two fields. It is the single highest-value five minutes available to you in the admin. If you do not have a site to do it on, create a free actor website and the fields are waiting for you.
