A few days ago I had a so called “consultant” say to me…I’m not really sure what I should tell people when they ask me what kind of info I should be telling my clients to include in their title and meta data. This person has been in this industry for over 5 years now, I was shocked. This probably comes from the fact that this person learned the correct answer to that questions 5 years ago, and hasn’t stayed up to date on it. So, here is my answer…if you have the same questions, I hope this helps.

Title

Your title is the most important element of your page. You must include it and optimize it if you want to have a chance at ranking for the important keywords you are targeting for that given page. Your title should be about 3-5 keywords in length and can be limited to that only as there is no need to waste that valuable space with anything else. If you were targeting the financial budgeting arena on your page here is a sample of what your title might be:

Financial Budgeting Software | Home Budget Software | Home Finance Software | Personal Finance

That would be it. Don’t load it up with anything other than the words you are targeting and be specific.

Meta Description

Your meta description is still important to a point because many engines still use it to serve as your description in their engine. Therefore, you want to fill it out with regards to your targeted keywords for that page. It should be around 25-30 words in length. Another financially related example:

At “domain.com” we believe that home budget software and home finance software is vital to your personal finance success. Use our financial budgeting software to stay on track for retirement.

Meta Keywords

This section is the least important by far of these sections. Some will say, don’t bother filling it out, but I teach that you want to fill it out in the right way or it will hurt you a bit. Limit this section only to the keywords you are targeting for that page and keep it simple. Don’t fall victim to your desire to load this section up. Example for the page we have been using as an example:

financial budgeting software, home budget software, home finance software, personal finance

That is it. Don’t load it up anymore for this given page and you’ve done it right.

Conclusion

I hope this helps provide you with some concrete examples and guides to assist you with writing your page title and meta data.

Back…It never left. I have read about eight blog posts and articles today on how the title tag is becoming really important again and that website owners should start including their keywords in their page titles again. I think it’s been good practice to optimize your title since I used Metacrawler to search the web. I mean really, what SEO would be able to tell their client that page titles are not important and keep a straight face.

Page titles are the most important element of onsite optimization and should be a focal point for every website owner that intends on creating traffic through search. I guess I’m just surprised, more than anything to see, that that many SEO’s are talking about how all the sudden the title is important again. To demonstrate in a clear way, I will give an example of a title used in offline guerrilla marketing…see the picture below.

Here’s a title, in a sense, from an offline service company that installs vinyl fencing in Utah. It’s their name and it says Vinyl Fencing on it; good keyword placement. It’s at the top of the fence and doesn’t include more than about 10 words. And, it’s clearly out there for all to see. I guess my point is, if you can make good use of a “title” when installing a vinyl fence offline, you might want to make sure you actually make use of an optimized title on each page of your site.