Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

When search engines list your site, they use the page title as the heading of the listing. This title is the underlined word in bold, above. The page title is also visible to the visitor in the upper left corner of the browser window.

Meta descriptions are hidden but important tags on your web pages. If you include them, most search engines including Google will use them verbatim underneath the title to describe your site.

Let's start with the title. Search engines will catalog the inner pages of your site, and a search result may bring a visitor to any page at random. So, the title of every page should represent a useful, 72 character (max) heading for that page. In the above example, instead of a title "Special Offer", it would be better to use "Pennsylvania Country Furniture Special Offer"

Looking at the examples here, you can see that the descriptions are nonsense and gibberish. This is because the page designers did not provide a description meta tag. As a result, Google tried to read the page itself and came up with mostly nonsense.

Have you ever noticed how many web sites are described with just an address and a phone number? Not very compelling. This is because the site owner paid no attention to this subject.

The next page shows how to put an appropriate page title and meta description on your web page..