Page Titles and Descriptions

Page Titles are very important for Search engines. The titles in the browser are displayed in the title bar. The search engines would look at the this title bar to determine what the page is all about.

Description tags are called meta tags as they are not displayed by the browsers as that of titles. But these descriptions may be displayed by some search engines. They are used to describe the contents of a page in 2 or 3 sentences.

The Meta title tag is far more important than your meta tags. The Meta title characters are best when its about 65 characters (meta title tag recommended characters length) including white spaces and are keyword rich. More weight-age is usually given to keywords in title tags. Use a unique title on each page of your website and make it describe what will be found on that page. Make sure the title and description tag matches the pages content. Also make sure that the main keywords for each page are in the title tag. Meta title characters with spaces should be minimal i.e. it should not start or and with a space.

Meta description tag is usually the text displayed under your page title in the SERPs. The Meta description characters are best when its about 65 characters. This helps the user decide which of the 10 results to click on, or to move to the next page or a different phrase. Make the meta description tag human readable and enticing.

Meta Keywords tag are used to place your keywords that you think a surfer would search in Search engines. Repeating keywords unnecessarily would be considered spam and you may get permanently banned from SERP’s

Most of the webmasters (including me) believe the following are good quantitatively

Meta Title Length = 63 characters
Meta Keyword tag = 256 characters
Meta Description tag = 156 characters

All values are including spaces, and make sure beyond this limit the stuff will get cropped automatically.

Warning: DO NOT stuff your title with just keywords.

Title are important even in your everyday life

Let’s say you are in a music store looking for cd’s of Rock Music. As a browser, your eyes review the titles of each cd case looking for something that is relevant to what you are searching for. Title is so important even here.

Most Common Title Errors

* The title tag should be a description of the page and not a long list of keywords.

Example of a Bad Title

seo freelancer, seo freelancing, freelancer seo, freelance seo, search engine optimization, seo consultant, google, yahoo, msn
* Missing titles in your pages. Some webmasters forget to include Title tags and hence it would be shown as “Untitled Document” by default.
* Most common title’s seen in user web pages is “Welcome to my Page”. Its useless as it tells nothing about the Page Content.
* Some webmasters also include their domain name in the title. Something like “SEOFreelancing.com” as a title is bad.
* Your Titles in the wrong position.
* Confusing and inaccurate titles.
* Too many Spaces in Meta Title