Big Guide Through On Page SEO Factors - Part 2

Keywords in the title

Try to include the main keywords in the title. Keywords in title are extremely important so never underestimate this step! Title of every page should be unique, depending on the page topic. Place the title as high as possible in the website source, ideally as the first tag in the "head" section.

Google shows about 60 first letters of the title in SERPs, Yahoo! and MSN a little more. So if you will write longer titles, the main information about the page should be included in the first 60 letters.

If possible, the main keywords should be in the beginning of the title. This will help you to achieve higher prominence. Example: "Web Hosting Company located in Seychelles | Company Name".

Keywords in the description

Meta tag description describes the content of the particular page. It means that every page of your web should have its own unique description. Many webmasters make the mistake that they use only one general description for the entire website. Yes, it can save their time but there are some disadvantages. First, the description probably will not fit good the page content. Keep in mind that content of the description tag is usually used by search engines as a part of website's listing. Your potential visitor will see this listing and if he will not find what is he looking for he will probably visit website of your competitor. Another problem can happen if some of your pages has too little content. There is a big risk that search engines will classify these sites like duplicate. Nobody knows exactly their algorithm but search engines like fresh, unique content and not duplicate sites.

Case study:

Some time ago I started a jokes site. The goal of this site was to be ranked good for the main keyword "jokes" and joke categories names (e.g. blonde jokes). So I used unique titles, description and keyword meta tags for the home page and joke categories. The particular jokes had one general title and description (each site included one joke and most jokes was about 15 - 25 words only). And what happened? When I typed into Google site:mysite.tld, I saw this: "Results 1 - 7 of about 43 from mysite.tld. In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." So 36 sites was considered duplicate. I probably didn't get "points" for having a lot of unique content. Anyway when I realized this, I changed all titles and descriptions -- I made them all unique. When I tried site:mysite.tld one month later, Google said: "Results 1 - 43 of about 43 from mysite.tld".

Conclusion -- if you make your description tags unique, you provide better information for your visitor and search engines too. They will like you both.

Meta tag description should contain keywords related to particular page. Always include the keywords used in title (the most important keywords) and add some more specific keywords. Google displays about 150 from description characters in its listings, msn and yahoo more (I have seen up to 300 characters in some yahoo listing descriptions). Anyway if you plan from some reason use longer description, always write the most important information in the beginning. It will be useful not only for your potential visitor when he finds your listing in search engine but also for your search engine ranking. You get a few "points" from search engines because you achieve higher prominence of your keywords you are targeting.

Some webmasters confuse meta tag description and keywords. I have seen many websites with description like "Keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3 etc.). This is called "keyword stuffing" and you can be sure that search engines don't like it. Here is an example of meta tag description for web hosting site: Web hosting service offering 25,000 MB web space, 400 GB bandwidth, PHP, MySQL and Perl, website builder and free domain name.

In the next part of this article I will show you how to use meta tag keywords, alt tags, how to integrate your keywords to the website content and I will say you something about anchor text.

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