A lot of people I speak to want to understand more about how to use the Title tag <title>, META DESCRIPTION and META KEYWORDS tags to get the best SEO results for their page and get better Google rankings.
Crafting the words you use in these 3 tags will
- influence what keywords the page is indexed for
- increase the chances of someone clicking on the link in the search engine results pages (SERPS).
Write these 3 tags carefully and bias them towards the keywords you want to optimise your page for.
However write good Title tag <title> and META DESCRIPTION tags for each page, as this is what the search engines will display in the search engine result pages (SERPS). If you don’t write a Title tag <title> and a META DESCRIPTION tag for your page, then the search engines will, by default, make up what they show which can sometimes look very weird and not entice people to click.
Think of the Title tag <title> and META DESCRIPTION as a mini sales pitch for your page. It’s effectively encouraging the user to click your link in the SERPS. You could liken it to the structure of an Adwords advertisement. You can use different keywords in the page Title tag <title> and META TITLE tags and have a page rank for both keywords although your should thematically relate them.
(At the time of writing in August 2009, the META keywords tag is significantly less influential than it used to be in helping the search engines determine the keywords you want to page to rank for.)