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Writing Meta Titles Correctly for SEO

When pursuing search engine optimization, you are going to have to confront the issue of meta tags. There are a couple of strategies when it comes to writing them, but meta titles require some specific care.

Let’s start with a quick review. Meta tags are simply code telling a search engine bot what is on a particular page. There are three tags – the title, keywords and description. You can see the meta title and description for any page on a site by going to a search engine and typing site:thedomain name. The first blue line is the meta title. The text below it is the description. The meta keywords do not show up in the listing, which should tell you everything you need to know about their value!

Meta tags and search engine optimization are a marriage, sometimes an unhappy one. In the old days, say four years ago, meta tags were a critical component when it came to obtaining high rankings. Hundreds of articles, books and debates were held on the specifics of getting the tags just perfect for Google, Yahoo and MSN. These days, meta tags are important, but much less so. This fact of life has led to some sloppiness when writing them, particularly meta titles.

The meta title should contain the relevant keyword phrases for the page in question. One strategy is to stuff them with 13 to 16 phrases. Stuff is a bad word in SEO, but not in this vein. Another strategy is to simply put one keyword phrase that contains no less than three or four words. You can take whatever approach you like, but you need to give some consideration to what the meta title actually says.

The meta title serves a very important point that has nothing to do with search engine optimization. It introduces your site to people conducting searches. When the search results appear after a query, a person will read down the results. They will focus on the first blue line of each result – the meta title. This is your opportunity to beg them to click your listing instead of those around you. If your meta title crams three or four different phrases together it is less enticing.

Personally, I prefer to add enticements to my meta titles. Let’s say I have a site where people can list something for free. I will obviously use my keyword phrase in the meta title, but I will also add “free listing” or some such language. If I am in the top three or four positions in the search results, people are going to be more likely to click through to my site than to those above me. Instead of just slapping any old meta title up there, I have turned it into a marketing tool.