Page structure

Page Title tag

Possibly one of the easiest of all SEO fixes, yet one of the most commonly overlooked, the title tag is a major determinant of how search engines see your page. The title tag is like the name of a book printed on its cover – no author would have a cover without a title because the book will never get found, yet there are millions of web pages with no title.

The primary reason why the title is important is that search engines put considerable weighting on its content to determine where the page should appear in search results. In some cases the title can be more important than the content on the page to determine its significance. Consequently, the title needs to communicate keywords and relevance for ranking to help ensure the page is indexed properly in the first place.

The second major reason is that a page’s title is directly copied into the first line of any search result, so for a visitor to click through the result it needs to be relevant to their search. Search terms that the user has entered in their query will appear bolded in the title, so the more terms that match, the more the title will attract their attention.

Description tag

The description tag used to be much more important than it is today and was a major determinant in ranking. Less ethical sites would spam the description with keyword repetition and often provide descriptions that were irrelevant to the page’s actual content. Consequently, as search algorithms have become more complex, its usefulness for SEO purposes has declined, and it’s not conclusive whether the description influences ranking in Google anymore.

Even so, it’s still an important attribute if used properly, since the description is often displayed in search results below the title, acting like a sub-heading to the title. Visitors use the desciption to find out if a page is relevant for their search, so rather than repeating the title, a good description will elaborate on the content. As with the title, it’s worth spending the time to craft your copy to motivate people to click.

As for the keywords tag…

Whereas both title and description are useful meta tags, keywords is no longer used and can be largely ignored. Google officially doesn’t use the keywords tag anymore – and there’s no indication that any other major engine does either- so this tag is largely considered defunct in the SEO community. While some people protest its relevance, since it was once a major factor in determining rankings, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to include a keywords tag, I wouldn’t recommend going to any effort to add it to your web pages.

In the book, we cover a range of other tags and features essential for optimizing webpages for SEO.