For the next few weeks, I'm working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

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Title Tags

The title element of a page is meant to be an accurate, concise description of a page's content. It creates value in three specific areas (covered below) and is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization:

The NFL's homepage features the title tag "Official Site of the National Football League"

The title tag of any page appears at the top of Internet browsing software, but this location has been noted to receive a relatively small amount of attention from users, making it the least important of the three.

"National Football League" appears in bold at the top of the search result listing for www.nfl.com

Using keywords in the title tag means that search engines will "bold" (or highlight) those terms in the search results when a user has performed a query with those terms. This helps garner a greater visibility and a higher click-through rate.

Keyword Use in the Title Tag (from Search Engine Ranking Factors)

The final important reason to create descriptive, keyword-laden title tags is for ranking at the search engines. The above screenshot comes from SEOmoz's survey of 37 influential thought leaders and practitioners in the SEO industry on the search engine ranking factors. In that survey, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword use in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.

As title tags are such an important part of search engine optimization, following best practices for title tag creation makes for terrific low-hanging SEO fruit. The recommendations below cover the critical parts of optimizing title tags for search engine and usability goals:

• Be Mindful of Length - 65 characters is the maximum amount that will display in the search results (the engines will show an ellipsis - "..." to indicate when a title tag has been cut off), and sticking to this limit is generally wise. However, if you're targeting multiple keywords (or an especially long keyword phrase) and having them in the title tag is essential to ranking, it may be advisable to go longer.
• Place Important Keywords Close to the Front - The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful they'll be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in the search results (at least, according to SEOmoz's testing and experience).
• Leverage Branding - At SEOmoz, we love to start every title tag with a brand name mention, as these help to increase brand awareness, and create a higher click-through rate for people who like and are familiar with a brand. Many SEO firms recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach - think about what matters to your site (or your client's site).
  
• Consider Readability and Emotional Impact - Creating a compelling title tag will pull in more visits from the search results and can help to invest visitors in your site. Thus, it's important to not only think about optimization and keyword usage, but the entire user experience. The title tag is a new visitor's first interaction with your brand and should convey the most positive impression possible.

For more advice on title tag optimization, see this post from SEOmoz - Best Practices for Title Tags.

Meta Tags

Meta tags were originally intended to provide a proxy for information about a website's content. Each of the basic meta tags are listed below, along with a description of their use:

• Meta Robots
  This tag can be used to control search engine spider activity (for all of the major engines) on a page level (for site-wide spider control, the robots.txt file is a better choice). There are several ways to use meta robots to control how search engines treat a page:
  • Index/NoIndex tells the engines whether the page should be crawled and kept in the engines' index for retrieval. If you opt to use "noindex," the page will be excluded from the engines. By default, search engines assume they can index all pages, so using the "index" value is generally unnecessary. 
  • Follow/NoFollow tells the engines whether links on the page should be crawled. If you elect to employ "nofollow," the engines will disregard the links on the page both for discovery and ranking purposes. By default, all pages are assumed to have the "follow" attribute.
  • Noarchive is used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they indexed, accessible to searchers through the "cached" link in the search results.
  • Nosnippet informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of text next to the page's title and URL in the search results.
  • NoODP is a specialized tag telling the engines not to grab a descriptive snippet about a page from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) for display in the search results.
  • NoYDir, like NoODP, is specific to Yahoo!, informing that engine not to use the Yahoo! Directory description of a page/site in the search results
  
  SYNTAX: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW, NOARCHIVE, NOODP">
  
  The tag above would tell spiders not to index the page, to refrain from archiving a copy while following the links, and to refrain from using DMOZ as a description in the search results. The "NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE" combination may be redundant for any search engines who do not archive non-indexed pages, but nonetheless it doesn't hurt to be thorough.
  
• Meta Description
  The meta description tag exists as a short description of a page's content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results:
  
  
  The meta description tag serves the function of advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from the results and thus, is an extremely important part of search marketing. Crafting a readable, compelling description using important keywords (notice how Google "bolds" the searched keywords in the description) can draw a much higher click-through rate of searchers to your page.
  
  Meta descriptions can be any length, but search engines generally will cut snippets longer than 160 characters (as in the Balboa Park example above), so it's generally wise to stay in these limits.
  
  SYNTAX: <META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="YOUR PAGE'S DESCRIPTION">
  
  For more on meta description tags, see Making the Most of Meta Description Tags from the SEOmoz blog.
  
• Meta Keywords
  The meta keywords tag had value at one time, but is no longer valuable or important to search engine optimization. For more on the history and a full account of why meta keywords has fallen in disuse, read Meta Keywords Tag 101 from SearchEngineLand.
  
• Meta Refresh, Meta Revisit-After, Meta Content Type, etc. - although these tags can have uses for search engine optimization, they are less critical to the process, and so I'll leave them to John Mueller of Google's Webmaster Central division to answer in greater detail - Meta Tags & Web Search.

URL Structures

URLs, the web address for a particular document, are of great value from a search perspective. They appear in multiple important locations, including:

Above, the green text shows the URL for SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards

Since search engines display URLs in the results, they can impact clickthrough and visibility. URLs are also used in ranking documents, and those pages whose names include the queried search terms receive some benefit from proper, descriptive use of keywords.

The URL as it appears in the browser window

URLs make an appearance in the web browser's address bar, and while this generally has little impact on search engines, poor URL structure and design can result in negative user experiences.

The URL above is used as the link anchor text pointing to the referenced page in this blog post.

URLs are frequently utilized as links by third parties, and as such, carry anchor text that is interpreted by search engines and users alike. Short, descriptive, compelling, keyword-laden URLs can thus provide both click-through and search ranking benefits.

Below are several guidelines to construct great URLs:

• Employ Empathy
  Place yourself in the mind of a user and look at your URL. If you can easily and accurately predict the content you'd expect to find on the page, your URLs are appropriately descriptive. You don't need to spell out every last detail in the URL, but a rough idea is a good starting point.
• Shorter is Better
  While a descriptive URL is important, minimizing length and trailing slashes will make your URLs easier to copy and paste (into emails, blog posts, text messages, etc) and will be fully visible in the search results.
• Keyword Use is Important (but Overuse is Dangerous)
  If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don't go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for SEO purposes - overuse will result in less usable URLs and can trip spam filters (from email clients, search engines, and even people!).
• Go Static
  With technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, there's no excuse not to create simple, static URLs. Even single dynamic parameters in a URL can result in lower overall ranking and indexing (SEOmoz itself switched from dynamic URLs - e.g. www.seomoz.org/blog?id=123, to static URLS - e.g. www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls, in 2007 and saw a 15% rise in search traffic over the following 6 weeks).
• Choose Descriptives Whenever Possible
  Rather than selecting numbers or meaningless figures to categorize information, use real words. For example, a URL like www.thestore.com/hardware/screwdrivers is far more usable and valuable than www.thestore.com/cat33/item4326.
• Use Hyphens to Separate Words
  Not all of the search engines accurately interpret separators like underscore "_," plus "+," or space "%20," so use the hyphen "-" character to separate words in a URL, as in the SEOmoz 11 Best Practices for URLs example above.

For more information about URL Structure, see the SEOmoz post - 11 Best Practices for URLs.

 

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Sorry I've been away from the blog so long. I needed a break, and am finally getting a bit of a real holiday. SEOmoz is closed tomorrow (New Year's Eve) and Tuesday (New Year's Day), but we'll be back up and running Wednesday, January 2nd, and are looking forward to bringing you more great stuff in the New Year.