Spoke
Titles and meta descriptions
These are the only part of your page most people will ever see. A decade of advice about character counts has crowded out the one question that matters.
That the meta description is not a ranking factor, and that Google may rewrite your title link or snippet, are both documented by Google and linked below.
These are the only part of your page most people will ever see.
They're also where a decade of advice about character counts has crowded out the one question that matters: would somebody pick this result over the one above it?
Does the meta description affect rankings?
No. Google doesn't use it as a ranking factor. Its job is to influence whether somebody clicks once the result is already showing, which is valuable for a completely different reason.
Google may also decide not to use what you wrote, generating a snippet from the page instead when it judges that a better match for the query.
Titles
The title link is the headline of your result. Google builds it mostly from your <title>, and may use other on-page content when it thinks that fits better.
What works, in order of how much it matters:
Describe the page, specifically. "Local Services Ads: how billing works" beats "Services | Firm Name" by a distance that makes every formatting trick irrelevant.
Put the distinguishing part first. Truncation is real and varies by device, so the words that make you different shouldn't be last.
One title per page. Templated titles across a site produce results that are indistinguishable from each other in a list.
Brand at the end, if at all. On a results page full of competitors, your name is rarely what earns the click. Unless the searcher already knows it — in which case they're searching for you and will find you anyway.
Descriptions
Treat these as advertising copy with no bidding attached.
Say what the reader gets, in the vocabulary of the question they asked, and give them a reason to prefer this result.
Don't write a summary of the page. A summary explains, and an explanation is not a reason to click.
One per page. A duplicated description across a whole section is worse than none, because Google will generate something for each page anyway and yours added nothing.
When Google rewrites you
It happens, and it's useful information rather than an insult.
A rewritten title usually means yours didn't match what the searcher asked. A rewritten snippet usually means the page had a better answer somewhere than the one you summarized.
Both are worth reading as feedback. If Google keeps picking a sentence from the middle of your page, that sentence is doing the work your description was supposed to do.
More in On-page & content
Keyword placement
The most superstition-heavy topic in the field. Here's the small amount that holds up, and the large amount that doesn't.
Headings & structure
Most people pick heading levels by how big they render. They're a document outline, and the difference shows up for exactly the readers you care about.
Internal linking
Isolated pages chasing isolated keywords lost their value slowly and then all at once. What replaced them is depth, and the mechanism is your internal links.
Depth & intent
Depth is not length. It is whether somebody who arrived with a question can leave without needing another page — and intent is the thing most content gets wrong before a word is written.
Readability & formatting
Readability tools count syllables and sentence lengths and hand you a grade level. Writing to that number produces prose that scores well and reads badly.