When you have allocated your keywords to the various pages on your site, you will populate or include the keyword phrases assigned in the appropriate places for that particular page. Let’s take a closer look at all those appropriate places.
Title Tags—Use Descriptive Page Titles
It is extremely important that all Web pages have titles. Title tags are viewed as one of the most important elements of search engine optimization when it comes to keyword placement. Each of the pages on your Web site should have a different title, as each page is focusing on a different keyword phrase for optimization purposes.
The title is inserted between the title tags in the header of an HTML document. <HEAD> indicates the beginning of the header, and the ending of the header is marked by </HEAD>. A simplified version might look like:
• <HTML>
• <HEAD>
• <TITLE>Document Title Here</TITLE>
• <META-NAME=“keywords” CONTENT=“keyword1, keyword2,keyword3”>
• <META-NAME=“description” CONTENT=“200-character site description goes here”>• <META-NAME=“robots” CONTENT=“index, follow”>
• <!—Comments tag, repeat description here>
• </HEAD>
Title tag information identifies and describes your pages. Most Web browsers display a document’s title in the top line of the screen. When users print a page from your Web site, the title usually appears at the top of the page at the left. When someone bookmarks your site or adds it to their “Favorites,” the title appears as the description in his or her bookmark file. These are all reasons that it is important that a page’s title reflect an accurate description of the page. More importantly, the title tag is typically what the target market sees in search results in some of the major search engines. In Figure 2.4 you can see that a typical search result consists of the title tag as the link to the Web site, a brief description of the Web site, and the URL.
Every page of your Web site should have a unique title tag, and each title tag should accurately describe the page content. Your target market should be able to read the title tag and understand what the page they are about to view
contains.
Keep your title tags brief—in the realm of five to ten words. The longer your title tag is, the more diluted your keywords become and the more likely your title tag is to be truncated by a search engine. Google displays a maximum of 66 characters. Yahoo! Search, on the other hand, permits up to 120 characters for a title tag.
The shorter and more accurate the title tag is, the higher the keyword density and relevancy for that title tag. Try to keep your use of a keyword phrase to a single instance if possible, unless the title tag truly warrants duplication. In the case of a hotel, the word hotel might appear twice in a title—once for the hotel’s proper company name and once in a descriptive term such as a targeted geographic area.