Title & Meta Tags: Basics
November 4, 2010
Title and Meta tags are simply lines of text inserted into the HTML code of each of your web pages and are helpful to the optimization of your website. Your title and meta tags should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page they describe. Besides that, you should consider the length and the order of the characters/words included in each of the meta tags. Note that the search engine robots read from left to right and those words that come first are more important than those that come towards the end of the page.
Title tags are located at the very top of your site and are very important, likely the most important tag in the <HEAD> of your website. They should be limited to around 3 keywords/phrases that you want to rank highest for and that most accurately describe your site. The title tag is so important because Search Engines not only factor in the relevance of your Title in terms of search engine optimization, but the search engines also use it in their search results. On any search engine, when you perform a search, the Title tag is used in the anchor text of the links for each result’s website.
Meta tags are used to store information about a web page but are not actually displayed in a web browser. Your meta description tag should be just a couple sentences long and include information describing the content of your site. Your meta keywords tag should include approximately 5 keywords listed with commas and should reflect the search keywords you are targeting. Using meta tags is not the MOST important part of SEO but it is an easy way to reinforce your most important keywords.
Please keep in mind that title and meta tags aren’t going to magically make your website a raging success overnight. They can however, offer the ability to control how their web pages are described by the search engines, which will ultimately improve your listing at Google and get your site headed to your desired level.