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The Title Tag is one of the most important factors
in achieving high search engine rankings.
We talked about the basics of search engine optimization. Now
it's time get down to the meat! In this article we'll drill into one of the
most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings, the title tag.
What Is a Title Tag?
A title tag is essentially an HTML code snippet that creates
the words that appear in the top bar of your Web browser, for example, "XYZ
Company Home Page." These words were entered into the title tag of the site's
HTML code. They don't appear anywhere on the actual Web page. The HTML code for
a title tag looks like this:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>XYZ Company Home Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
The title tag is usually the first element in the <HEAD>
section, followed by meta description and meta keywords tags.
Some Web site creation tools automatically generate the title
tag from information you provide. You may have noticed Web pages that are
labeled "Page 1," "Page 2," or "Home Page" in the browser bar. Labels like
these are used by beginning Web site designers who simply don't know how to use
title tags for maximum benefit.
Search Engines and Title Tags
All search engines use title tags to gather information about
your Web site. The word(s) in the title tag will appear in the hyperlink
listings on the search engine results page; people click the hyperlink to go to
your site. Arguably, your title tag is second in importance only to the actual
text on the page in determining your site's ranking with the search engines.
So far as placement of your title tags is concerned, most
search engine experts agree that it probably doesn't matter if the title tag is
the first element in the <HEAD> section. However, I believe that good coding
practice argues for placing it first.
What Not to Put in Your Title Tag
More important than the placement of the title tag are the
words you put in the tag, and the order in which those words appear. Many site
owners mistakenly believe they should put their company names in this tag. This
is only a good idea if you are a well-known company that people will be
searching for by name, such as Coca-Cola or McDonalds. Otherwise, you should
assume that most potential customers will be searching for specific products or
services, not a particular company name.
For example, if your company is named "Johnson and Smith Inc." and you are a
tax accountant in Texas, putting only "Johnson and Smith Inc." in your title
tag will probably be fruitless. If you absolutely insist on including your
company name in the title tag, put it at the end of the tag, after the more
important keyword information. (A number of search engine gurus believe that
some search engines give more weight to words that appear first in the title
tag.)
Title Tags Should Be Specific Keywords and Phrases
As the Texas tax accountant, you would want your company's site
to appear in the search engine results for searches on keywords such as "Texas
tax accountants" and "CPAs in Texas." You would need to be even more specific
if you prefer to work for people only in the Dallas area. In that case, use
keywords such as "Dallas tax accountants" in your site's title tags. This is a
key point: If you're only seeking customers or clients in a specific
geographical region, your keywords need to reflect that geographical
specificity. People looking for a tax accountant in Dallas may begin their
search by simply entering "tax accountant" in the search engine. However, once
they see that their search is returning accountants from all over the world,
they'll narrow the search by adding "Dallas" to their search terms. When they
do, you want your site to be right there on the first page of new results.
In our Dallas accountants example, you could create a title tag
that says
<TITLE>Dallas tax accountants</TITLE>
or you could say
<TITLE>Dallas CPAs</TITLE>.
However, there's more than enough space in the title tag to
include both of these important keyword phrases. (In fact, search engines will
display 60 to 115 characters of your title tag.) Here's an example of a better
approach:
<TITLE>Dallas tax accountants dallas CPAs</TITLE>
Most search engines are not case-sensitive. In the past, a few
of them were, so it was important to try and utilize both lower and upper case
in your Title as necessary. Since most engines don't make any case distinction
any more, I recommend creating Titles that look the most enticing; that is,
something that will get the user to click on your listing. Whether this means
you prefer ALL CAPS to make it stand out, or first letter caps, is up to you.
As for placing the word "Dallas" twice in the title tag, I have
found this approach to be both permissible and effective. Just make sure that
you don't put the same words right next to each other. For example, a tag that
reads "Accountants in Dallas -- Dallas CPAs" is very likely to trigger a red
flag with the search engines, so that the word could get ignored entirely. It's
also not a good idea to use a word more than twice or to repeat more than one
or two words total in the title tag. However, if you keep these caveats in
mind, it's fine to repeat one or two keywords in your title tags.
Use Only Keywords and Phrases That Are in the Text on Your Page
If you're not sure what to put in your title tag, take a look
at the text within the page itself. If you've done a good job with your
writing, you should find all the keywords you need right there on your page.
Simply choose the most relevant ones for the title tag. If you can't find any
good keywords on your page, it's time for a rewrite.
The optimal approach when creating a Web site is to think of
all the keyphrases that best reflect your business, and then compose text
around those phrases. When you go to write your title tag, you simply revisit
the keyword list, make sure the keywords are being used on the page, and poof,
you've a good, keyword-rich title tag.
But remember: If the words don't appear somewhere in the text of your page,
they shouldn't be in your title tag.
Using our tax accounting firm example, suppose you look at the
text on your page and notice that the phrase "Texas tax accountant" doesn't
appear anywhere on the page. Does this mean you shouldn't use this phrase in
the title tag? Well, yes and no. If you're not willing to change the text on
your page, then no, you shouldn't put those words in your title tag. However,
you can also forget about ranking high for those words! The smart thing to do
is to rewrite the text on your page so that it utilizes the keywords that are
important to you. This doesn't mean to just stick the words at the top or
bottom of the page. It doesn't mean to hide them in the background. Nor does it
mean to put them in a tiny font so that no one will notice them. And it doesn't
mean to simply put them in your meta keyword tag. If keywords are important
enough that you want your site to be found under them in the search engines,
they are important enough to be elegantly incorporated into the body text of
your page.
Once you have incorporated important keyphrases into the text
of your site, all you have to do is take these same phrases and put them in
your title tag. It really is that simple.
Creating a Meta Description Tag
The words placed within the Meta Description Tag can help a
page to rank high in the search results.
The meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs
inside the <Head> </Head> section of a Web page. It usually is placed after the
title tag and before the meta keyword tag.
The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or
two goes here.">
The Purpose of the Meta Description Tag
The purpose of this tag is twofold. The words placed within
this tag are given some weight with most search engines and can help a page to
rank high in the search results for these particular words. Just as important,
the words placed in this tag appear under the title in a search engine's list
of results (in most search engines).
If no information is supplied for this tag, or this tag is
omitted from the HTML code of a Web page, the search engines will often use the
first words that appear on the Web page as the description of the site that
appears on search results pages. You've probably seen a search results page
with some of the results that look like this:
"Joe's Motor Homes" — [home] [next page] [more info] [links]
The search result looks like that because Joe neglected to put
a meta description tag in his HTML code. The search engine picked up the first
words on the page, which happened to be some navigational links. As you can
see, not only does this look bad, but it doesn't give searchers much
information to go by to know whether or not they should click into this site. I
know that I personally tend to skip over results that look like this and click
on the next link that has some more relevant information describing what is on
that particular page.
How to Create Killer Meta Description Tags
Because this tag serves two purposes, it must be thought about
differently than the title tag and meta keyword tag. I use both of those tags
strictly for high search engine results rankings, but the meta description tag
must also be thought of as a marketing tool along with being a vehicle for high
rankings. It should definitely utilize the important keywords for the page, yet
it should also be written in such a way that it will entice people to click on
the link and visit your site.
If you've taken my previous advice (from past articles) and had
a professional Internet copywriter write the copy for your Web site, you can
often take an important descriptive sentence or two from the copy and place it
in the meta description tag. Even if the page wasn't professionally written,
you can still probably find a line or two that will work for this purpose. Some
people recommend using the first line of text on your page if you're stumped as
to what to use. If you have an appropriate first line, then that can certainly
work fine.
I don't believe the search engines give this tag nearly as much
weight as they give the title tag. However, I do feel that some engines do
index the words in this tag, and therefore it is important to get some keywords
into it. I have also heard that the first words in this tag are often given
more weight than later words. Because of this I put the important keywords
first. I also usually try to use the same first words that I've used in my
title tag as the first words in my meta description tag whenever possible. I
usually limit this tag to one good descriptive sentence, although I have
occasionally used two sentences if they're fairly short. Generally, most
engines will index approximately 200 characters of the meta description tag.
The longest ones I've seen have been in
HotBot. I try to not repeat words in this tag; however, I do use various
forms of words in this tag, i.e., plural/singular, "ed" or "ing" forms of
words, and that sort of thing. I always make sure this tag is an actual
sentence, not simply a list of keywords.
Can Meta tags such as
the keyword tag bring high rankings to my site?
If you had to give up one meta tag, the meta keyword tag
would be the one to give up.
Now that we've covered the all-important
title tag and meta description tag, it's time to move on to the very
misunderstood and abused meta tag, the meta keyword tag.
Everyone knows that to obtain high search engine rankings all
you have to do is put the keywords that you want to rank high with into your
meta tags, right? Not even close! If it were that simple, I'd certainly be out
of work. How many of you reading this column have obsessed over meta tags such
as the keyword tag? How many of you have tried putting every relevant keyword
you could think of into this meta tag, only to have your site continue to be
nearly invisible in the search engines? How many of you couldn't decide if you
should put commas between the keywords? Spaces? No commas? ALL CAPS? Plurals?
What Does This Meta Tag Look Like?
This meta tag is usually placed beneath the title and meta
description tags in the <HEAD></HEAD> section of your pages' HTML code, like
this:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>your DESCRIPTIVE KEYWORDS title goes here</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your keyword rich marketing sales-pitch meta
description goes here">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="your keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but
not a space">
</HEAD>
If this meta tag were a child, it would be put into a foster
home due to all the abuse it has received over the years! Once upon a time, in
the prehistoric days of the Internet (1995?), meta keyword tags were a great
little tool for the search engines to use to help them determine how to rank
sites in their search results. When the engines' databases were small, this
meta tag was a quick, easy method to help decide which keywords might be
important on a site.
However, as always happens with anything this simple, people
began to abuse it. People (spammers) began to put keywords into the meta tag
that had nothing to do with the content of their site. Because they knew lots
of people were searching with the keyword "sex," for instance, they'd put that
word in their meta tags a number of times to bring visitors to their site, even
though their site had nothing to do with sex! Personally, I don't quite
understand that logic, because it brings in untargeted visitors But apparently
the goal was to bring in traffic, period.
Over time, less and less weight was given to poor abused meta
tags, and more and more weight was given to the actual content of the pages.
Today the meta keyword tag is quietly living in its foster home and is fairly
irrelevant to getting a page ranked high. If you were pressed for time and had
to give up one meta tag, this would be the one to give up. To be sure, some
engines still do index the words within these meta tags, but it appears that
they use them as a minor supplement to the text in the body copy and title tags
of your Web pages.
Should I Bother With Meta Keyword Tags?
Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to
determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort.
You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some
weight, and therefore you should certainly use meta tags (including the meta
keyword tag), along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique
available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that
still read them. At worst, it won't hurt your rankings (unless you brazenly
keyword stuff them). I still use these meta tags on clients' Web sites, but
don't bother with them on my own sites.
What Should I Put in these Meta Tags?
First let's recap what needs to be done before you attempt to create meta
keyword tags (ideally these things should be done before the Web site is ever
created):
- Choose your relevant keywords.
- Write the site's content based on these keywords.
- Create a title tag using the same keywords.
- Create a meta description tag as a marketing sentence, also
based on these keywords.
Once you do the above things properly, putting together your
meta keyword tag is a very simple procedure.
I usually begin putting the keywords I used in the title of my
page in the meta keyword tag. The first words in any tag are assumed to be
given more weight, so these are most important. Then I go through each
paragraph of text on the page and take any important phrases that might be used
in the copy and paste them into the meta keyword tag. I usually separate the
phrases with a comma and no space. This is simply a personal preference. Using
no commas at all in this tag is basically the same thing, since most engines
appear to treat commas as a space. After I get every important word or phrase
from the text on the page, I add some common misspellings of some of these same
words. I know for a fact that in the past, this could bring some traffic from
some engines, most notably AltaVista.
What About Keyword Repetition?
Another common abuse of meta keyword tags was -- and still is
-- the repetition of words. Spammers found that if they repeated keywords
enough times in this meta tag, the search engines would "think" they were
relevant to the page and perhaps give it a high ranking for those keywords.
Because of this abuse, too much repetition will now hurt you rather than help
you. Never insert the same word twice in a row in this tag, even if you're
using different variations. (Plurals, ALL CAPS, different tenses, etc.) You can
use the same word in different phrases, but never use that word more than three
or four times within the tag, even if you're using different variations of it.
That's about all there is to it! If everyone treated these meta
tags with the type of respect they deserve and only put relevant keywords into
it, perhaps we could get it out of its foster home and back to its rightful
place in the family of meta tags!
At TheUSYellowPages.Com it is important that all of our customers web site's
Meta Tags are properly done so they can maximize there web sites ranking on
search engines.
For Site Owners: Submit your site
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