Often when reading about SEO online, it’s common to come across suggestions that you shouldn’t spend much time on your page title tags or keyword and description Meta tags. Many SEO articles even say that you shouldn’t even bother with keyword and description Meta tags. So what is a good webmaster or site manager to believe?
Well here’s the truth. The page title tag is among the most important parts of any web page since it is what people see as the link to your site in the search engine results, which can play a major role in whether or not they choose to click on the link and visit your site. Also, the page title tag is the most important place to put your primary keywords (in addition to your page content), since the search engines use the title tag to help in determining what a page is about.
Now this is where things get controversial. A lot of people still think keyword and description Meta tags are either silver bullets or completely useless. Actually they’re neither. As for keyword tags, Google largely ignores them. However, Yahoo! and MSN/Live still refer to them and often use them to some degree in their rankings. Description Meta tags are still used by many search engines to provide a description of your web site in their search results, which again may influence click-through rates from search results. Also, Google does analyze description Meta tags as part of their algorithm, even though they do not display them in their search results.
So here’s what we suggest:
1. Write a good strong title tag that uses your most important keywords and keep the tag down to about 60 characters.
2. Use the keyword tag for your most important keywords and keep the tag down to about 5 or 10 keywords.
3. Write a description tag for your site that’s reasonably informative and includes your most important keywords and keep this tag down to about 150 characters.
If you already have good title tags and keyword and description tags for all of your web pages you’re on the right track. If not, you’ve got some work to do. Sometimes it’s the smallest detail that separates a page that shows up in the search results for a particular query. Therefore, put your best foot forward and put your web page titles and SEO Meta tags to work for your site.
I’d be keen to see what Googlebot sees. ,