Lesson 4 – Title and META tag creation

Search engine optimization is now a big part of building web sites. Webmasters everywhere have come to the realization that making sure their sites are search engine optimized is a very important part of creating successful web sites. Obviously, SEO isn’t the most up front subject in the world, so it’s a good idea for webmasters to go through some SEO lessons to ensure that they are using the correct SEO principles. In lesson 4 of our 12 lesson set on SEO, you’ll learn about a basic, yet crucial principle of SEO: Title and META tag creation.

What are META tags?

META tags are essentially tags which describe your web site to the search engine spiders. These tags previously factored into the ranking aspect of search engines, but this is no longer the case. META tags now are responsible for telling the spiders what your site is about. What your META tag says may determine what kind of description your site has on search engine results. However, like we’ve said, these tags do NOT factor into ranking. So no matter how many keywords you use in the META tag, you will not get any higher of a ranking.

What are Title tags?

Title tags, on the other hand, are a factor in the search engine rankings. If you look to the top left of this page, you’ll see the name of this site and probably a brief description of what this site is about. This is the title tag. A title tag will typically come in this form: “Name of the site – brief description of site”. The title tag is particularly important because it is the first thing people and spiders will see when looking at your site. For instance, when a person sees your site in a search engine, the title tag will be the title for your site’s listing. Thus, it is important that, when creating title tags, you make sure that they are SEO and people friendly.

Using a keyword in the title is a good idea, but only if it fits in the title. By this we mean that it should not feel out of place. If you have a site on guitars, a good title tag might be “guitars.com – Home of Electric Guitars”. It’s a relevant title and includes a good keyword (electric guitar). A bad title for this same site would be “guitars.com – Home of Pianos, Guitars, Drums”, as you have used two unnecessary keywords (drums and pianos). Always make sure that the titles are readable for your visitors and do not excessively use keywords.

What is the HTML Coding for META Tags?

Even if you use Dreamweaver or another What You See Is What You Get editor, you’ll want to know the coding for META tags. It’s pretty simple, so you could be able to memorize it.

The Keywords META tag isn’t as useful as it once was and is now just a way for web masters to keep track of the keywords they use on their sites. The keywords within this tag will be ignored now by most of the search engine spiders and they will not factor into rankings.

The Robots META tag is pretty useful in that it tells search engine spiders what to do with the site. You can customize each of these three tags to fit your web site and the SEO principles you use. Alternative you can use the robots.txt settings.

What is the HTML Coding for Title Tags?

.</p> <p>A Typical <Title> Tag:</p> <p><TITLE>Name of the site – Brief DescriptionThere is just one title tag in an HTML document and it is located within the tags Title. The title tag usually appears right below the tag Head.
This is very easy to remember and quite basic. You’ll use the title tag in every single web page you create. If you do not have a title tag, you’ll not only have incorrect HTML coding, but also a site that goes unranked.

Lesson 4 Wrap-Up:

In this lesson you learned about META and Title tag creation. You’ve learned the two quite in depth, so you should be able to apply what you’ve learned to your own web sites. Good luck!