In this article, I'm going to show you step-by-step how to create search engine optimized Titles and META Tags.
The TITLE Element :- TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the most
important factors that search engines "look" at when it comes to
determining the relevancy of a web page against a search query. In their
ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a
high relevancy weight to the content of the TITLE tag.
In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one (for a fictional florist):
<TITLE>Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.</TITLE>
To view the HTML code of any site, choose "View, Source" from your
browser toolbar or right click anywhere on the page and choose "view
source code".
The META Description Tag :- META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of web pages.
Search engine robots will gather up this information when indexing web
sites and often use it when referencing web pages in the search
listings.
While not all search engines continue to utilize the META Description
Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the content of this tag
(together with a site's visible content) to provide information about a
site that they can match with search queries. It is therefore important
for webmasters to include keywords and phrases in the META description
that they would expect searchers to use to find their site content.
In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Description Tag looks like this:
<META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful
floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions,
including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events.
Deliveries throughout Florida.">
You can view the META Description Tag of a site by viewing the source code.
The META Keywords Tag :- While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these days, the
META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a site's HTML code, if
only to provide those search engines with as much information as
possible about site content.
In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Keywords Tag looks like this:
<META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets,
florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts,
Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches,
sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral
displays, Miami, Florida">
The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many search
engines can be attributed to increasing spam abuse by ignorant
webmasters. These webmasters thought the keyword tag was a good place to
stuff hundreds of keywords in the hope of achieving a higher search
ranking, thereby "spamming" the search engines with useless,
non-relevant data. This prompted many search engines to filter out the
META Keywords Tag or lower its importance within the ranking algorithm.
You can view the META Keywords Tag of a site by viewing the source code.
Create Your Own Optimized Tags. Now, it's time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your own site. Let's start with the TITLE Tag for your Home Page.
Create Your TITLE Tag. Take the list of target keywords and phrases that you want your web site
to be found for in search engines. You should have already allocated
them to the appropriate pages of your site to be optimized. I use a
spreadsheet for this purpose, but you should use whatever works for you.
Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you like, you
can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template. Let's say our
existing Title is: <TITLE>Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.</TITLE>
Now take your list of keywords for the home page and put them in order
of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest for at the top.
For our fictional florist these are:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets
Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a sentence or
short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword real estate
available. Always try to use as few words as possible in your Title
Tags, because each additional keyword dilutes the ranking relevancy of
all the others.
In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as follows: Florists in Miami Florida specializing in wedding bouquets
Notice how I've got the keywords in the correct order for the search
queries? I've tried to include the most important keywords towards the
start of the tag. There was no need for me to repeat the keyword
"Florists" more than once because the sentence I've used covers both
"Florists Miami" and "Florists Florida". Most search engines will ignore
"in" as a stop word, so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.
Although it's tempting to put a comma between Miami and Florida, on some
search engines commas act as a keyword separator, so we don't want to
use one here because we don't want "Florists' and "Florida" to be
separated. Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our 3rd keyword
phrase 'wedding bouquets" is right at the end of the sentence, meaning
it may lose some relevancy weight (search engines consider keywords
closer to the start of the tag as the most important). How do we fix
this? Let's try this:
Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty. We don't want to use a period after "Florida" for the same reason that
we don't use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a difference to
search engines yet still allow the sentence to read logically to a
searcher. So now we have our three target keyword phrases covered in a
very short space.
In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword combinations:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- florists in Miami
- florists in Florida
- florists in Miami Florida
- wedding bouquets
- Miami wedding bouquets
- Florida wedding bouquets
When integrating your keywords, remember that their order is important.
If you want your site to have the best possible chance of being found
for the search query "Miami florists", you need to put the keywords in
that exact order and not "florists Miami", because the spider searches
the keywords in exact order. Unless they are stop words, also try to
avoid using extra words between your keywords.
If you wanted to, you could integrate your company name into the Title
tag, but (unless your company name is super short or includes a
keyword), don't sacrifice a keyword to do so. Instead, try placing the
company name at the end of the tag so you can be sure that all your
important keywords will be indexed first.
In the case of our florist, let's imagine their name was Funky Florists.
We could easily accommodate the name into the beginning of our
optimized Title as follows: <TITLE>Funky Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.</TITLE>
It may reduce the keyword relevancy impact very slightly, but including
your company name enables you to brand your page, which may be more
important to you.
The content of the Title Tag is also what gets saved in a person's
Favorite's list when they bookmark your site, so having your company
name included is worth considering from a branding perspective.
