How to Create Search Engine Friendly Title and META Tags


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 not so fictional Chiropractor):

<TITLE>Chiropractor Los Angeles - Chiropractic Office</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="Los Angeles Chiropractor Dr. Guillaume Malinvaud, a Los Angeles chiropractor, is centrally located near Sherman Oaks, California. Our Chiropractic office is specializes in helping you ....">

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="Chiropractor Los Angeles, Chiropractic Office, Chiropractic care, Los Angeles, Chiropractor, Back pain, Headache, neck pain">

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 thesource 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 youshould 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>Chiropractor Los Angeles - Neck Pain.</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:

  - 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 (searchengines 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:

<TITLE>Provence Chiropractic in Los Angeles - Chiropractic Office Los Angeles.</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.