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 not so fictional Chiropractor):



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:



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:



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:



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:

- Chiropractor Los Angeles
- Neck Pain
- Chiropractic Office Los Angeles

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:

Chiropractor in Los Angeles specializing in treating Neck Pain, headache and Back pain - Visit our Chiropractic Office in Los Angeles Today

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. Most search engines will ignore "in" as a stop word, so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.

Notice that I have added the word today after
keyword phrase 'Chiropractic Office in Los Angeles" we don't want have one of our keyword at the end of the sentence, it may lose some relevancy weight (search
engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the
most important).

Visit our Chiropractic Office in Los Angeles Today

We don't want to use a period after "Today" 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:

- Chiropractor Los Angeles
- Chiropractic Office Los Angeles
- Los Angeles
- Neck Pain
- Headache
- Back Pain

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 "Chiropractor Los Angeles", you
need to put the keywords in that exact order and not "Chiropractic Office Los Angeles", 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 Chiropractor, let's imagine their name was Provence
Chiropractic. We could easily accommodate the name into the
beginning of our optimized Title as follows:



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.

Ressource: http://www.makaistudio.com