META TAGS BASICS

TITLE TAG

Most search engines use the title tag as the title of your page in the search results that appear to the user, and words used in your title tag are also helping towards your search engine ranking.

What this means to you is that this HTML tag must not only work to your advantage for keyword scoring, but also must be compelling to the reader. The title should be a maximum of 70 characters long and include the most relevant keywords of your web page.

Quick Tips:

Make your title interesting and "compelling" to the reader to convince them why they should click there.
Make sure every page on your site has a title representing the data on your page.
Try to be descriptive and use a title that lets people know what your site is about.
Don't use all CAPS in your title. Search engines hate it and it's difficult for users to read.
Make sure that title tag is grammatically correct

Example:
Priory Meadow Shopping Centre - Hastings UK

DESCRIPTION META TAG

The description tag gives the search engine the description that you want for your web site. If you don't have description tag, the robots will simply choose the first couple of hundred words on your page and create its own description.

Your main goal with the description is to make it appealing to a human. This text is what's going to convince them to click your listing, so think carefully about it. Also, make sure you have a different description for each optimised page on your site.

Quick Tips:

An ideal description should be somewhere within 150 to 200 characters, which correctly describes the content of the page.
Keep the words consistent between your description and keyword tags.
Avoid sentences such as: The best site on the web…

Example:
50 quality shops in the heart of Hastings, East Sussex, UK. A guide to Priory Meadow, Hastings Shopping Centre, from 1066online.com

KEYWORD META TAG

Search engines will often use the keywords found on your pages as the primary source to categorize your website based on the search engines indexing algorithms (proprietary algorithms which index your website in search engine databases).

Be sure you choose keywords that are the most relevant to your site and avoid excessive repetition as many search engines will penalize your rankings for attempting to abuse their system. Similar to the Description META Tag, search engines give priority to the first few words, so focus on your main keywords and then elaborate further by using synonyms or other related words.

Quick Tips:

Be specific. Usually, two-word and three-word phrases work better than single words.
When creating your keywords list, place the version of the keyword that your site visitors use the most at the beginning of your keyword list.
Since some keywords are commonly misspelled (such as the word "millennium"), you might want to put a misspelled keyword in your meta-tags. However, if that misspelled word does not appear in your main body text, this strategy is a waste of time. Search engines use both keyword frequency and keyword placement in their algorithms. If you are putting a misspelled keyword in only one place (i.e., your meta-tag keywords attribute), it's not helping your web page's relevancy because the keyword concentration for that one word is practically non-existent.

Example:
priory meadow,hastings shopping centre,hastings,info,guide,visit,east,sussex,uk,1066online

Each search engine uses a different algorithm to rank your pages, the suggestions above are intended to help you choose your main META tags for a good general search engine presence. Many other factors are involved in ranking your pages and the weight of each aspect depends on the algorithm used. Such factors include other HTML tags and HTML layout properties built into your page design, link popularity, link text, URL and directory structure to name but a few.