SEOenthusiast

Title and Meta Tags
Don't overlook obvious and simple SEO measures. Meta tags exist to provide information to bots about the site they are visiting. Although meta descriptions and meta keywords have no effect on ranking, they do exist to provide more contextual information for the search engines. So use them.

There certainly is much information that is superfluous to a page, but the meta desription and meta keywords tags are not so. Gone are the days where the words inserted into these tags artificially heightened the rank of a page whatever information appeared on the rest of the page. Long gone - and for good reason. But since latent semantic indexing (LSI), the more information you can give to Google to tell them about the page theme, the more accurate the result and since we are working on quality material and content, the greater the chance of Google showing our site in it's rightful place - high. What should be included?

The meta description is still used in some search engines to display in the SERPS. So make it promotional, but accurate and attractive to the SE's. The keywords are never displayed, but they do tell the bot about the page. In the section on LSI, we talked about the use of synonyms and actual content for the page and related pages. This is assisted by including relevant key words, key phrases and synonys of these in the meta keywords. It's not something to agonise over in terms of importance - it's not that important, but the better SE's went to the extreme of ignoring meta tags altogether - now they are adjusting through LSI (for Google) to getting all information available for every page, and compiling the information to construct an accurate picture of what the site is about and what each page is about - then how each page contributes to the overall site theme. Don't get stuck at the end of the last decade, things have changed, meta is read and assimillated - so include the information.

Now we come to something that is part of the trinity of importance for any good site. That means that at worst this factor is the third most important factor for successful SEO. The Title tag for the page. (The others are backlinks and general site quality/structure). The title tag must agree with the page content - it's slightly promotional - but it must be attractive to search engines too. Think carefully about the theme of the page related to the theme of the site. Think about the phrases you are optimising the page for, and how a search engine would like it. Then think about the main title that would appear to a potential visitor - would it also attract a human visitor?

Title and meta details are easily added to a page - don't neglect the obvious aspects of structuring a page - use meta key words, key phrases and meta descriptions. Pay particular attention to the title for the page, it's the first point of contact for the search engines and human visitors too.

Further Reading: About: Meta Tags for SEO | Jill Whalen on Title Tags

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