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That takes care of the humans who might come across your Title and Description tags. But SEO is about search engine bots, so there’s a few other angles to consider to make sure that search engines return your site in response to relevant searches. Firstly, everything above works brilliantly for bots as well as humans - search engines aren’t particularly fond of repeated content in general and prefer to see that meta elements relate well to the actual page content. But there are few more technical things you need to consider in order to truly optimise your meta tags for search engines. 1. Be honest about page content Just as you won’t impress a human visitor with overly grand claims, you’re not going to convince a search engine that your site is a useful, relevant and easy-to-use resource for potential visitors if your Title and Description bear only a passing relevance to your page content. Keep it short, snappy, and accurate. 2. Include relevant keywords - and use them wisely You’ll see that in the above examples, the keywords I searched on were bolded in the results, drawing the human eye to the fact that this result fits perfectly with the search. At the background level, the same thing happened with the search engine - it looked at millions of possible web pages and found that this one had relevant information. To make this work in your favour, you need to decide what the most important keywords are for each page of your website (we’ll cover keyword research in more depth in a future article) and make sure that they are in both your page content and your Title and Description tags. Choose just one or two keywords or phrases per page, and put them as close to the front of the tag as you can without sacrificing readability. Search engines consider the top of the page and the left-most area of a title or heading to be the most important and so attach more weight to it when deciding what pages to return in response to search queries. 3. Keep it consistent Develop a style for your title tags and stick to it. One good trick is to start with your brand name before discussing the specifics of that particular web page. You’ll get the benefit of a consistent format plus you’ll increase brand awareness - and the more people see your brand name, the more relevant and trusted it will appear. 4. Keep it short and sweet Search engines will only display a certain number of characters, so if you try to make the contents of your Title and Description tags too lengthy you’ll just be wasting your time as your carefully crafted content will be replaced by a … after a certain length. Much better to write something that presents the honest facts as briefly and enticingly as possible. If you offer a free trial of a product, for example, use your description to encourage your visitors to give it a whirl. The Keywords Meta Tag The Keywords tag is a widely discussed topic in the SEO community, since it’s the one that in the past has been most open to abuse by unscrupulous website owners stuffing common-but-not-necessarily-relevant search terms in just to try to show up on as many search results as possible. As a result, the major search engines have put in a lot of work to make sure that a) this practice does not benefit those who try it and b) the Keywords tag carries less weight than other meta data in terms of search engine ranking. It’s still open to discussion how far the keywords you add to this tag influence search engines, though it’s generally agreed that some search engines place more importance on them than others. However you look at it, there’s really only one guideline to follow: Keep it relevant For effective SEO, this should be your battle cry with every aspect of website design and copywriting, and the Keywords tag is no different. You don’t need hundreds of keywords, just a few well-chosen, targeted words and phrases which accurately reflect both page content and likely search terms. Don’t repeat every possible relevant keyword across every possible webpage - split them out and use them where they most reflect the page content. And don’t, for the love of sanity, indulge in the decidedly suspect tactic of adding keywords which you think will be commonly searched for but which have no relevance to your website - you won’t fool the search engines any more than you’d impress a human visitor with such tactics. more info click here >>
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