How to write a title and description people actually click

What Google is actually showing

A search result is three things: a web address, a bold blue line, and a couple of grey lines under it.
The blue line is your page's title. The grey lines are its description.
That's the whole shop window. Everything else on your page - your videos, your links, your writing - only matters after someone decides to walk in.

The title: say the real thing first

You get roughly sixty characters before Google cuts your title off with an ellipsis.
So put what you actually make at the front, not at the end.

• Weak: “Welcome to my page - Sarah”
• Better: “Sarah bakes sourdough - recipes, videos and classes”
• Weak: “Home”
• Better: “Beginner woodworking projects you can finish in a weekend”

Your own name belongs in there, but on its own it only helps the people who already know you.
Those people were going to find you anyway. The title is for everyone else.

The description: it's an advert, not a summary

You get about 155 characters here.
The instinct is to describe the page. Resist it - describe what the reader gets.
“A page about my channel” tells them nothing. “Weekly sourdough recipes, plus the mistakes I made so you don't have to” tells them whether to click.

Never use the same words twice

If two of your pages carry the same title and the same description, you've told a search engine they're the same page.
It will then pick one and quietly ignore the other.
Every page you publish deserves its own line - your card, your website, and each article.

Where you set these in Tublish

• Your Space's name and tagline become the title and description of your card and your website. Edit them on the E-Business card screen.
• An article's Title and its short summary become that article's own title and description. Both sit at the top of the article editor.
• If you leave a summary blank we'll write something sensible, but sensible is not the same as good.

Three things not to do

• Don't stuff in keywords. “baking bread recipes bread baking easy bread” reads like spam to a person and to Google, and both stopped rewarding it years ago.
• Don't promise something the page doesn't have. People bounce straight back, and that's a worse signal than never being clicked.
• Don't leave it to chance. An empty description means the search engine invents one from whatever text it finds first.

One honest caveat

None of this makes a search engine index your page, and nothing can.
Whether you get listed at all, and how fast, is entirely their decision - often a few days, sometimes weeks, and never guaranteed.
What your title and description decide is what happens once you're there: whether the person searching picks you, or picks the result underneath you.
That part is yours. It takes about a minute per page.