Basic SEO: Title and Meta Information

The Title Tag

In the opinion of many SEO specialists, the title is the most important tag in a web page as far as making sure the search engines know about your content. The title refers to the text in the title bar of your browser window not the title of the page. If the title tag is missing, the title will be called ‘untitled document’ so GoogleBot will have a hard time trying to determine what your page is about.

A title for a web page can be up to 65 characters as a maximum and should probably only contain between 3-6 words written in title case, that is to say, each important word should have a capital letter. A good title will reflect what the page is about. From an SEO perspective, your keywords can be used in the title if they are relevant to the page’s content. Separate phrases with commas or the | symbol. Both seem to work well as separators. There is also a bias for words at the beginning of the title. Words at the beginning carry more weight than those at the end. This is not good because the weighting, but also because if this is repeated for all the titles the titles look fairly similar and will have less relevancy to search queries.

Do not use phrases such as Welcome, or Home Page as these do not really describe the content. There are millions of website which have done this and the chance of ranking well for this is tiny. A common mistake for business websites is to include the name of the company before the keywords that describe the content on every page.  Every page should have its own unique title.  However, the quality of a title is weighted such that the most important words should be at the beginning. Ideally before you start writing the titles, you will have researched which phrases have the highest relevancy and search volume but with the least competition but as an example:

Gibson’s Hydrochloric Acid: Acids, Bases and Chemical products.

A better title would be:

Chemical products, Acids, Bases

unless your company is so well-known that your visitors search for the company name. In that case,

Chemical Products, Acids, Bases – Gibson’s Hydrochloric Acid.

would be appropriate. The company name appears at the end of the title because it is going to be repeated on every page. With the weight of the title on the first words if the company name is at the beginning the title is nearly the same for all pages. Therefore any repeated text should go at the end of the title.

As the title appears in the search engine results, some people try and differentiate their titles by using strange characters this should be avoided as it is frequently connected with spammy sites.  You cannot imagine:

~^#%’(*)!(*)’.,.,.,’(*)!(*)’.,. BBC News ,.,’(*)!(*)’.,..,’(*)!(*)’%#^~

It is just wrong. Don’t do it.

Meta Information

The meta information refers to a number of attributes within the meta tag. Largely, they are all ignored by the search engines because people have misused them in the past to try and gain higher rankings in the search results. That said, there are two which most SEO specialists will add to every web page. These are  description and  keyword meta information.

Description

The description is a piece of text which is designed to describe the content of  the web page. It is sometimes also the text that is displayed when Google lists a page from your website in its results. While it is not important to your ranking, it is important that you write a good description so that when it appears in the search results, it will entice the user to visit your site over the other sites.

<meta name="description" content="Gibson's Hydrochloric Acid,
 suppliers of chemical products including: acids, bases and alkalis." />

Descriptions should be quite short, only around 150 characters of the description are displayed in the search results for Google and so it is a waste of time writing any more than this. You should include keywords in the description if they also appear within the content.

You may find that the description is pulled from a different part of your web site . Sometimes, the site description may be taken from the DMOZ directory which  is a human edited directory which  Google has a lot of trust in. Because it is a human edited directory, it can be difficult to  obtain a listing. If you are lucky enough to have a listing and Google is pulling your description from this site, you can tell it to use the site description using:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

Keywords

This is self-explanatory. It is a list of keywords that are contained within the content of the page. Often web masters will take up a lot of space with keywords but it is only necessary to include a few of the main keywords that can be found on the page and are relevant to the page.

Keywords are an opportunity for you to add synonyms or mis-spellings of a word (although Google is quite accurate about suggesting the term you were trying to search for if you spell it wrongly). For our acids, keywords might include:

<meta name="keywords" content="acid, acids, base, bases, alkali,
 alkalis, chemical, chemicals" />

and so on. It won’t necessarily improve your ranking but a match here will mean that your page will be considered.