Keyword Placement
The locations of your keywords count!
Title Tags
The most critically important location to place keywords is within your web page’s <title> tag.
- Your page’s title tag is one of the most important aspects of web page design in respect to scoring well with most search engines. It tells the search engine what your page is about.
- Your title tag is what the search engine uses as a link on the search results page. It confirms to your potential site visitor that your page is what they searched for.
To find other web pages that are using your keywords in their titles, go to Google and enter:
intitle:”put your title keywords here”
This can give you a handle on how many other pages are competing for the same keywords.
- Avoid wasting space with words like your company name, unless it is so well known that people use it as their primary keyword.
- Avoid using stop words in your title tags. Search engines ignore these words and they waste valuable character space. However, keep in mind they do add to your title’s readability. Stop words include the, of, that, is, and, to, www, web, web page, homepage, home page.
- Google doesn’t read past 65 characters, and you don’t want to make your title longer than 120 characters.
Description Meta Tag
The description meta tag isn’t as important for SEO, but don’t neglect it, as it is used by many search engines as the summary description of your page. It’s also your sales description to encourage searchers to visit your site. If you omit it, search engines will usually pull some arbitrary text from somewhere on your page.
None of the other meta tags have any effect whatsoever on search engine rankings.
If you’re looking for an in-depth book on search engine optimization, look no further than the SEO Book. It is filled with excellent up-to-date information. You won’t go wrong with it, I promise!
