Optimizing Your Title and Meta Tags
June 12th, 2008 at 08:01pm Under SEO
One of the single most important things you can do SEO wise for your website’s ranking in the SERP’s is to optimize your title and meta-tags.
Now it used to be back in the stone-age when I began SEO that the meta keyword tag counted for something but due to abuse it has been almost completely eliminated from factoring into most search engines ranking algorithms and in the case of Google it is not counted at all, however some minor search engines will still take it into limited account.
This is not true for your title and to a lesser extent your meta-description tag. While the meta description tag does not count for much, your title counts heavily in Google’s algorithm although not as much as it used to.
I know… I can hear you saying it now to yourself. Everyone knows that so why bring up such a basic SEO point? The reason is that I still see so many people utilizing these important SEO tools wrong.
The most common mistake I see with the title and meta-description tag is that people simply try to jam too many words into them thereby decreasing thier effect at best and at worst incurring a penalty by the search engines.
What you need to know about title and meta-description tag is that the weight given to each word and the tag as a whole decreases with every word. Moreover the search engines spider will discontinue reading your title and meta-description tag after a certain number of words anyway, so not only will they not see the words you enter past a certain point but you are effectively watering down the words that they do read.
You should never enter more than around 15 words for these tags and preferrably no more than 10 especially for the title. Ideally you should have about 5 words for the title and 10 to 15 words at most for your description tag.
Another common SEO mistake I see people make a lot with regard to these tags is putting thier URL in thier title which is a waste of prime SEO real-estate, since generally speaking if someone types in professionalseo.com for example my site would come up #1 anyway and the same goes for your site as well. The one exception to this is if your domain name is a prime search phrase then you might consider doing so but the .com at the end is unnecessary.
Lastly, with regards to the decription tag, do not make it a carbon copy of your title. Your title should encapsulate the overall theme of your site with a few well chosen keywords seperated by a delimiter like a hyphen or a vertical pipe, while your description tag should expand on that theme and describe your site in a more detailed but natural looking sentence.
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