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 not so fictional Chiropractor):

Chiropractor Los Angeles - Chiropractic Office

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:

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:

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 (http://searchengineland.com/070905-194221.php)

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:

Chiropractor Los Angeles - Neck Pain.

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:

- Chiropractor Los Angeles

- Neck Pain

- Chiropractic Office Los Angeles

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:

Chiropractor in Los Angeles specializing in treating Neck Pain, headache and Back pain - Visit our Chiropractic Office in Los Angeles Today

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. Most search engines will ignore "in" as a stop word, so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.

Notice that I have added the word today after

keyword phrase 'Chiropractic Office in Los Angeles" we don't want have one of our keyword at the end of the sentence, it may lose some relevancy weight (search

engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the

most important).

Visit our Chiropractic Office in Los Angeles Today

We don't want to use a period after "Today" 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:

- Chiropractor Los Angeles

- Chiropractic Office Los Angeles

- Los Angeles

- Neck Pain

- Headache

- Back Pain

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 "Chiropractor Los Angeles", you

need to put the keywords in that exact order and not "Chiropractic Office Los Angeles", 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 Chiropractor, let's imagine their name was Provence

Chiropractic. We could easily accommodate the name into the

beginning of our optimized Title as follows:

Provence Chiropractic in Los Angeles - Chiropractic Office Los Angeles.

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.

Ressource: http://www.makaistudio.com