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How to Create Search Engine Friendly Title and META Tags (Part 1)
By Kalena Jordan (c) 2007

In this article, I'm going to show you step-by-step how to
create search engine optimized Titles and META Tags.

The TITLE Element

TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the
most important factors that search engines "look" at when it
comes to determining the relevancy of a web page against a
search query. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major
search engines attribute a high relevancy weight to the content
of the TITLE tag.

In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one
(for a fictional florist):

<TITLE>Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to
order.</TITLE>

To view the HTML code of any site, choose "View, Source" from
your browser toolbar or right click anywhere on the page and
choose "view source code".

The META Description Tag

META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of
web pages. Search engine robots will gather up this information
when indexing web sites and often use it when referencing web
pages in the search listings.

While not all search engines continue to utilize the META
Description Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the
content of this tag (together with a site's visible content) to
provide information about a site that they can match with search
queries. It is therefore important for webmasters to include
keywords and phrases in the META description that they would
expect searchers to use to find their site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Description Tag
looks like this:

<META name="description" content="Miami Florists create
beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays
for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties
and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida.">

You can view the META Description Tag of a site by viewing the
source code.

The META Keywords Tag

While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these
days, the META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a
site's HTML code, if only to provide those search engines with
as much information as possible about site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Keywords Tag looks
like this:

<META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings
bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries,
Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day,
tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals,
corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami,
Florida">

The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many
search engines can be attributed to increasing spam abuse by
ignorant webmasters. These webmasters thought the keyword tag
was a good place to stuff hundreds of keywords in the hope of
achieving a higher search ranking, thereby "spamming" the
search engines with useless, non-relevant data. This prompted
many search engines (http://searchengineland.com/070905-194221.php)
to filter out the META Keywords Tag or lower its importance
within the ranking algorithm.

You can view the META Keywords Tag of a site by viewing the
source code.

Create Your Own Optimized Tags

Now, it's time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your
own site. Let's start with the TITLE Tag for your Home Page.

Create Your TITLE Tag

Take the list of target keywords and phrases that you want your
web site to be found for in search engines. You should have
already allocated them to the appropriate pages of your site to
be optimized. I use a spreadsheet for this purpose, but you
should use whatever works for you.

Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you
like, you can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template.
Let's say our existing Title is:

<TITLE>Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to
order.</TITLE>

Now take your list of keywords for the home page and put them in
order of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest for
at the top. For our fictional florist these are:

  - florists Miami
  - florists Florida
  - wedding bouquets

Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a
sentence or short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword
real estate available. Always try to use as few words as
possible in your Title Tags, because each additional keyword
dilutes the ranking relevancy of all the others.

In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as
follows:

Florists in Miami Florida specializing in wedding bouquets

Notice how I've got the keywords in the correct order for the
search queries? I've tried to include the most important
keywords towards the start of the tag. There was no need for me
to repeat the keyword "Florists" more than once because the
sentence I've used covers both "Florists Miami" and "Florists
Florida". Most search engines will ignore "in" as a stop word,
so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.

Although it's tempting to put a comma between Miami and Florida,
on some search engines commas act as a keyword separator, so we
don't want to use one here because we don't want "Florists' and
"Florida" to be separated.

Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our 3rd
keyword phrase 'wedding bouquets" is right at the end of the
sentence, meaning it may lose some relevancy weight (search
engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the
most important). How do we fix this? Let's try this:

Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.

We don't want to use a period after "Florida" for the same
reason that we don't use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a
difference to search engines yet still allow the sentence to
read logically to a searcher. So now we have our three target
keyword phrases covered in a very short space.

In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword
combinations:

  - florists Miami
  - florists Florida
  - florists in Miami
  - florists in Florida
  - florists in Miami Florida
  - wedding bouquets
  - Miami wedding bouquets
  - Florida wedding bouquets

When integrating your keywords, remember that their order is
important. If you want your site to have the best possible
chance of being found for the search query "Miami florists", you
need to put the keywords in that exact order and not "florists
Miami", because the spider searches the keywords in exact order.
Unless they are stop words, also try to avoid using extra words
between your keywords.

If you wanted to, you could integrate your company name into the
Title tag, but (unless your company name is super short or
includes a keyword), don't sacrifice a keyword to do so.
Instead, try placing the company name at the end of the tag so
you can be sure that all your important keywords will be indexed
first.

In the case of our florist, let's imagine their name was Funky
Florists. We could easily accommodate the name into the
beginning of our optimized Title as follows:

<TITLE>Funky Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a
specialty.</TITLE>

It may reduce the keyword relevancy impact very slightly, but
including your company name enables you to brand your page,
which may be more important to you.

The content of the Title Tag is also what gets saved in a
person's Favorite's list when they bookmark your site, so having
your company name included is worth considering from a branding
perspective.

In Part 2 of this article, I will show you how to create your
optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags.
================================================================
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine
optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and
respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as
running a daily Search Engine Advice Column
(http://www.searchenginecollege.com/blog.htm), Kalena manages
Search Engine College (http://www.searchenginecollege.com/) - an
online training institution offering instructor-led short courses
and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization
and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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