The Title Tag

Title Tag is most essential Tag among other SEO related components, as it not only passes on the theme of the webpage to the human internet visitors but is also said to be very important to attract Search Engine crawlers. Most of the people are confused that Title Tag is a Meta Tag, which is not.

Almost all the crawler based search engines look at the Title Tag to collect information about any website on the internet. The search engine uses the keywords or the content of the Title Tag in the process of during allotting ranks. This is done because they want to analyze the relevance of the web page before giving the rank. Most of the search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, AOL and AltaVista etc look at the webpage's Title Tag to evaluate its relevance. Therefore, it is advisable to be very cautious using the keywords or key-phrases in the Title Tag.

It is better to use same keywords not just in the Title Tag, but also in webpage text and the Meta Description Tag of the page. If the keywords are used in the Title Tag and not present anywhere else in any of the content on the webpage, then it is better to avoid using them in the web-page title as the impression and importance of the keyword in the Title Tag gets decreased.

It is very important to sequence the keyword or key phrases in the Title Tag appropriately. More important is the order in which they appear. Many SEO experts suggest that webmaster or website owner should have the most important keyword or keyphrase in the beginning of the Title Tag that can help displaying the title in bold in the SERP (search engines result pages).

The Meta Tag

Meta Tag is a part of HTML code that enables webmaster to provide a short and brief summary about the web page content. The Search Engine Results Pages -SERPs display the title that internet surfer generally reads and then the description that follows it. Readers then decide whether to visit the website or not.

A powerful optimized Meta description Tag can hike up the page rank on some engines for the targeted search terms. If it is case of having flash, frame or image on the websites with no text content, some of the engines look Meta Description Tag as a website’s summary and accordingly give place in their SERPs – search engine results pages. Therefore, it is always better to make its content unique and alluring to the internet surfer as it can improve the click through ratio.

Some of the search engines may not give very high importance to the Meta Tag Description, but then too, Meta Tags are looked by them and taken into their accounts in one or the other way. The search engine giant Google ignores the Meta Description Tag and instead, automatically generates its own narration for the webpage it crawls. Other search engines such as Yahoo!, MSN, and HotBot etc support it partially.

Some of the guidelines to be followed while Title Tag and Meta Description Tag optimization:-

Many SEO experts believe that you should have the unique Meta Description Tag for every web page. In this, use the keyword or key phrase that is applicable to associated web page content text.

You should avoid excessive keyword repetition. This is because such over density of the keywords could be considered as spam by almost all the search engines.

It is better to concentrate more on the sequence of keyword/phrase and put important ones in the beginning of the Meta description Tag. This, in turn, makes it logical conviction.

To avoid being truncated by search engine, you should keep the Meta Description Tag to a 225 characters uttermost; to be on safer side, set the limit to 150 characters.

It is really fruitful effort to have a fresh content with some catchy and compelling keyword rich Title Tag and Meta Tag optimization. Optimizing in such a manner can bring a better listing in the SERPs and more eminent click through ratio.