Title tag
The Title Tag normally sits within the head section of your HTML document and will look something like this:
<title>Title tags and their usage - SEO tips - My Web Site</title>
When you use this tag correctly, its contents will appear on the bar at the very top of your browser window (or on the tab if you’re using Chrome).
It also appears as the blue text on a Google search results page so it’s important to get it right as this is probably the first thing that people searching for your content will see.
As this is the first thing that identifies your page to a search engine it might also be advantageous to avoid starting with letters too far down the alphabet. Search engines will primarily list results by order of relevance but they will also sub-order by alphabet; starting your title tag with ‘The’ or ‘Welcome’ will result in your page being listed among the ‘t’s and ‘w’s.
To get more accurate hits you should make sure you have the most unique content (relative to your site) comes first and keep the content relevant to the page content. Content title, section title and website name in that order is probably the best way to do it – the most unique content first and the least unique last.
Most search engines will only index a certain amount of the data that makes up your page before they give up so it’s important to keep your title snappy as well.
Meta Description tag
This is another tag from the head section of your HTML document and will look like this:
<meta name="description" content="This site is about SEO tips" />
When users search for your site this text will appear beneath the page title in the Google result so it’s important that this text gives a good summary of the page’s content and really sells it.
This tag won’t really affect your SEO ranking but it will encourage users to click the link so you should really work on selling your page to the user here. You also need to exercise a bit of restraint. As we saw for the title tag, most search engines will only index a certain amount of data from your page so don’t use it all up with your description – somewhere around 30 words should be enough to fit in a decent description and not distract the search engine from crawling more of your page.
Meta Keywords tag
Yet another tag from the head section of your HTML document, the meta keywords tag should look like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="search, optimize, seo, meta, keywords, html" />
This is how the search engines judge the relevance of your page to the string the users have typed in. Search engine will also compare the content of both the keywords and description tags with the content of the page – your site will be marked down if there is too much difference!
Keep your keywords relevant to the content of your page and don’t include any words that don’t appear in the body of your page. If your page is about cars you may be marked down if your keywords all relate to butterflies.
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