Back in the early 90s, in the pioneering time of Search Engines Optimization meta-tags were the most importance factor when it came about optimizing a page. At that time it was enough to spam your title, description and keywords meta-tags with tons of keywords and rank on top of search engines for most of them. However, as the time passed, search engines algorithm evolved and more and more factors started to be taken in consideration so the importance of the meta-tags constantly dropped over time.

The only one meta-tag that remained very important over the time is the title tag (<title>Title</title>). In fact it is not a meta-tag, but a simple HTML tag, but there are quite a lot of people that consider it as a meta-tag so I mentioned it too. It is important not only for the SEO value it carries (which is quite high), but also for the fact that it appears on SERPS and is the most important factor that affects the CTR ration. When writing titles for your pages you should have a few things in mind: it should be user friendly (so people will actually click it and come to your site), it should include the keywords (so it helps the rankings) and it shouldn’t be too long. An example of good title for a library called “Book Lovers” and located in Boston would be: “Book Lovers – best library in Boston” or “Book Lovers – your favorite Boston library”.

The description meta-tag (<meta name=”description” content=”A one sentence description goes here.”>) is the second most important meta-tag. Again it not only cares some SEO value, but it also appears on SERPS and affects drastically the CTR. Considering that it’s most important role is to increase the CTR and not to carry SEO value I highly recommend you to write it for visitors and not for search engines. If you mention your main keyword it’s enough from a pure SEO perspective. An example of good description for the same Boston library would be: “Book Lovers is one of Boston’s best libraries; we aim to be the first library where you can find the newest book edition.”

The keywords meta-tag (<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3”>) carries nowadays only a minimal SEO value and a lot of SEO experts even ignore it. However, if you’re like me, someone who considers that every bit counts you may want to add it to your site. However be careful to not spam it – use only 3-4 keywords and be sure that those keywords also exist in the page’s text. To continue with our previous example some good keywords would be: “Book Lovers”, “library”, “Boston”.

Any other meta-tag carries no SEO value anymore and using them will only make your pages heavier; so I highly recommend you to stick only with title, description and keywords meta-tags. If you want you can even use only the title meta-tag for your inner page (there are a lot of SEO experts that do so). But, under no circumstances, don’t copy the same title, description and keywords on all your pages because this may lead to a penalty; and I’m sure that this is the last thing you want to happen to your site.

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Using Title Tags to Improve SEO & Website Conversion

Search engine optimization (or SEO) is clearly important in this day and age. An entire industry has arisen around the quest to get to the top of the search engines, with black and white hat SEO witches battling it out to stay in the top five positions.

It sounds like a scene out of dungeons and dragons doesn’t it? However it’s a serious business when hundreds of thousands of visitors are lost because rankings disappear, which equates to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

In a previous article I discussed how to select keywords to help you to start planning a targeted campaign. When you get to the end of this article I hope you should have a fair understanding of the importance of the HTML Title tag with regard to search engines and far more importantly with regards the humans, the people, the guys and gals that you want to get to your website so that they can buy your goods and services.

Firstly, what is the title tag?

The title tag is an element in the header part of an HTML page denoted by two <title></title> tags. For instance you might have <title> Using Title Tags to Improve SEO & Website Conversion</title>. That would mean that the title would read (as a link on search engines like Google for instance “Using Title Tags to Improve SEO & Website Conversion”. Setting yourself some simple guidelines to help you write your tags is a good idea.

Guidelines are good but not set in stone

There are no hard and fast rules for writing titles but there are some guidelines you might want to follow. W3C (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/TITLE.html) say on their website that ideally a title should be 64 characters or less and that titles may be truncated if it’s longer than that. Google show 66 characters in their search results listing, Yahoo allow listings up to 120 long. What I would suggest is that you bear these sensible limits in mind when writing the contents of your title tags.

If you need a long title make the first 66 characters Google friendly and use the rest up for Yahoo. In order to learn how to effectively use these 66 characters you should know how titles are used online.

Online uses of titles

1) Titles are used by website resource librarians, directory editors (such as DMOZ), and other webmasters (such as strategic link partners) when they link to your website.

2) The title is displayed in web search results by the vast majority of search engines to help you target and attract your visitors.

3) Nearly all the major search engines use a title tag in order to rank your page. Search engines deem the title one of the most important pieces of information when determining what the content of your website is.

4) The title is displayed in the visitors browser window usually at the top of the viewable part of the browser screen.

Browser screens, search results, editors, why is this important?
Firstly, by carefully crafting your website title you make it more accessible to resource librarians, editors and webmasters. If you have a nice simple title link which they can add to their pages both relevant and understandable they are far more likely to link to your website. If they link to your website using a hyperlinked title relevant to your target audience, you get targeted traffic from simply writing a good title tag. More relevant traffic means much higher conversion.

Secondly if Google or Yahoo crawl your website and find that the title tags you’ve written are relevant to the page on which they are written it means there is a much greater chance of a good ranking on the engines. A good ranking on the engines for your selected keywords means that you’re more likely to be found by your target audience. This again means that you attract the people that you want to your website, the people who are looking to buy your product or service. The title tag becomes your search engine listing. Think of it this way, in a similar way to the classified ad you write for a newspaper, the title tag listing is your online advert, so make it as attractive and relevant as possible to attract the right visitor.

Thirdly, the browser window is affected by the title and it’s convenient for the visitor to your page. How many times have you had five or six Internet browser windows open? A good title tag means that a quick scan of these titles shows the reader which page is which. The first couple of words in the title it could be argued for this reason alone are the most important text you will ever write for a web page you want to be read.

In summary

You want your web page to be read by your desired audience.
That’s all. Your title tag is the first step toward achieving that goal. Abraham Lincoln once said, “If you have eight hours to chop down a tree, spend 6 hours sharpening your axe.” The title tag is your web pages axe, it’s the part you should refine so that you get the most from the search engines. Of course there is more to SEO and website conversion than simply the title tag. In the next article we’ll discuss the next important point to sharpen, the headline, or rather the <h1> tags that should be used in conjunction with titles to be even more search and conversion friendly.

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The whole point of blogging is to give your readers some valuable information or just to simply get your opinion out there and shared with your readers.  Sometimes your blog is created for the purpose of advertising or getting the message out to the world about your business and the intent of driving traffic to your websites or merely getting your Internet presence established.

In that case there is the need to optimize your blog for a search engine and many folks struggle understanding this really simple concept or even learning what it simply is.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and this is what I’d like to share with you.  Getting a readers attention and having great information that provides benefit to your readers might be very easy for many bloggers.  But getting their blogs optimized for the search engines can be a battle that stumps many authors.

So how do you get your blog SEO’d for your marketing purposes or merely just to get seen and read?

This is an easy process that is relatively the same as with a business or personal website, with the exception that it’s a blog.  First you need your Keywords. The proper keywords that your blog is relevant to should be embedded into your content around a minimum of 2-3% but not really any more then that otherwise the bots that crawl web pages will see it as spammy.  Many blogs have the option of adding “tags” or otherwise “keywords” into a box which is known as meta tags.  To be blunt, those are not really even viewed and Google bots that spider your blog will not even read them.

The algorithms that Google uses and constantly update to provide their own customers with a good experience is actually very good in my opinion. They are getting smarter all the time in reducing spam and redundancy in the rankings and all the “black hat” tricks that were known about before simply don’t work anymore and it’s usually some rehashed garbage that someone tries to sell you about how to SEO.

One of the best ways you can figure out some keywords for your blog topic is by searching online for some free keyword tools and SEO resources.  You shouldn’t have to pay for any of this.  While I myself use SEO and keyword tool software that I had to buy, I’d like to point out that it is not necessary and you completely do not need to ever buy a keyword or SEO tool.  There is plenty of good tools that are free and available online with a simple bit of research.

A keyword is primarily the key factor that gets your blog seen and crawled by the spider bots to obtain your ranking in most of the major search engines.  Without the proper keywords and amount,  this process would be nearly impossible to have optimization for your blog. When you do in fact have them and have done some research about which ones you should use for relevancy, you should then slap them in your blog and be sure to somehow include it into your title. This is highly recommended because the title and your keywords inside the content of your blog will be seen and ranked at a much higher point system by the spiders crawling it.  The newest way that Google has programed their algorithms for relevancy is to give points for content and this is something of importance to note.

All those pretty graphics and java scripts, hyperlinks etc merely serve as a means to clutter your blog and give you much lower rankings.  Try to clean up your blogs with only what is truly needed there and remove all the pictures and graphics that you can.  The bots crawling your page will not overlook you next time they come to crawl your site.  Try keeping your blog plentiful with quality and fresh content so that nothing gets confused.  It will give you a higher ranking and overall better chance of total optimization by removing the clutter.

When your blog is ready and you feel confident in the SEO you’ve made, it’s a process of simply submitting it to all the search engines and then sit back and enjoy your traffic.

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