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Website Optimization Guide: Titles and Meta Tags

September 21, 2008

One of the first things you should be looking at when optimizing your website for the best search engine results is your meta tags and titles. Why is it important?

First of all, search engines operate on the principle of providing the most relevant webpage of the most relevant website for any searched keyword/keyphrase. Therefore, the main task in optimizing your website is making search engines' job of understanding what your website is all about easier. By placing relevant keywords in the title of the website you explain search engines what is the theme of your website. Please note a few things though:

  1. Do not stuff the title with one particular keyword/keyphrase - that will not help you rank better however it may raise a spam alert.

  2. Don't make the title too long. It should not exceed 65 characters.

  3. Don't just list your keywords in the title separated by comma or other symbols. Try combining several keywords that you are targeting and remove common keywords as much as possible and put them in a sequence so that they still make sense as a sentence. For example if you are targeting: VoIP, VoIP provider, VoIP service provider, local VoIP service - you put together a title that combines all of them and uses each word from each keyphrase only once. (sometimes it might not be possible but try to reduce repetition to the minimum). See a sample below:
    Keyword combination in the title

  4. Place the most competitive keyword at the beginning of the title. You may want to skip your companies name in the title, especially if you are going after some very competitive keywords.

  5. Do NOT have exactly the same title throughout the website. Each page of the website should have a unique title. If you have a static website it will take some time to go through each page separately and change the title. If you have a big dynamic website, you will require some slight coding updates.


Second of all, when people are using search engines it's your titles and meta tags that are showing up in the search results. You want to make it the most attractive and relative to the search term the visitor typed into the search box. Let's have a look at an example:

Optimized Title and Meta Tags Sample

Notice how StudentsMetro's listing is bolded several times throughout the listing, which makes it stand out way better than those of the competitors.
(Meta Tags optimization tutorial coming soon)