Title, Description, and Keywords
by Mark Perkins
If you have suggestions or other helpful hints, please email me at mark@moreptiles.com and I will check them out and include them when appropriate.
One of the most important parts of your web site are your meta
tags. Web crawlers look at your meta tags to find out about your site.
Meta tags contain the key words that will be used when your site is listed in a
web search. The main meta tags are your page title, keywords, and
description. The following is an example of the part of the html code for
a web page that contains the title, keyword, and description meta tags
(highlighted in blue):
<head>
<meta name="keywords" content="reptiles,exchange links,
reptile web site, web tools,moreptiles ">
<meta name="description" content="Guide to help get more
hits on your reptile site, by Mark Perkins, analysis of meta tags, listing of
sites to exchange links">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<title>Get more hits on your reptile website</title>
<meta name="Microsoft Theme" content="expeditn 001, default">
</head>
Title
Your title is the most important element of your web site, since it is the major key word phrase search engines will use. A good title is recommended to be less than 60 characters including letters, spaces and carriage returns. Be sure to pick a title for your web site that prospective visitors will search for. For example, if your company "Hot Boxes Inc. " is in the business of selling reptile enclosures, then a good title might be Reptile Enclosures by HotBoxes Inc. The reason that this would be a good title is that customers looking for reptile enclosures, are likely to search on Reptile Enclosures in their web browser, and having that as your site title will give you the best chance of having a page one listing Make sure that the word of your title appear in the web page.
Description
The description META Tag is another very important part of your web page. The description will show up on the search results along with the title to your web site. The description is recommended to be 150 characters or less. A good description will factually what you site offers and give prospective visitors a summary of what they will find if they visit your site.
Keywords
Keywords are words or phrases that best describe the contents of your web page. You should have about 10 to 20 word or phrases that would be likely things prospective visitors might look for in your site. Be sure to include all of your key words in the text of your web page.
Click on the following site to check the meta tags on your web site: Free META Tag Analysis Tool The tool will analyze your META Tags to make sure they are present, and check the word count, but it will not check to see if they are the best choice in words for your site. Some advice that I have is to imagine what potential visitors to your site might search for. Make sure that you include these words in your META Tags. Also, make sure that you include all of the words and phrases in your META Tags in your web page.