Optimizing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Search Engine Optimization can be difficult. However, there is a lot that is much easier that the local user can easily do to increase their search engine rankings. Today we will focus on Title Tags and Meta Descriptions.
Title Tags
These are the storefront of your business online. This is what appears when users see your content on their search engine.
There is a 70 character limit to the characters that will be seen when it appears on a Search Engine. So it is extremely important to keep these within the parameters of the 70 characters. In addition though, it’s important what you write and the order. This is where you need to be maximizing the use of the keywords that are most important to your business. For example, if your business manufacturers DVD players, an acceptable Title Tag will be
“FULLERTON’S BEST DVD PLAYERS GET YOUR NEXT HOME THEATER AT JOHN DOE’S!” (LETTER COUNT = 70)
It is important to remember that the closer your keyword is to the front of the title tag the more effective and higher weight it will be given in Google’s ranking. Also note the emphasis on local! Remember that every page of your website has the opportunity to rank so try to optimize all the pages.
In order to ensure that your Title Tags fit the character count you can use word, but a tool that we use at Ron Wave Design is Lettercount.com. It’s a great tool that doesn’t look visually appealing but is extremely effective in what it does.
Meta Description
Meta Descriptions are the descriptions that you will find under the Title Tag. The mechanics of the Meta Descriptions are pretty much the same as Title Tags, it just allows for more characters (150 – 160) Again here keywords have bearing on your ranking so you want to make sure that you include those that are most important for your business. Remember though it must be a coherent description. If your description is just a list of keywords, be prepared for your invitation to Google’s black list. That is NOT a party you want to be at.
Remember that the Meta Descriptions should be unique for each page. Each page of your website does something different and your meta description allows you to diversity your keywords!
Meta Tags
I do want to clear up some confusion here. Meta Tags once were the emphasis for Bloggers and SEO professionals, however, with the recent update in the last year, Google has discontinued it’s emphasis on Meta Tags completely. Meta Tags are now used simply for web designers to take notes on the pages they are working on.
They ARE NOT used for SEO.