Title tags and SEO

Title tags are perhaps the most important SEO tags for any web site, and if you can place your keywords
in the beginning of the title tag, that improves the effectiveness of those tags much more. The
maximum number of characters allowed by most search engines for title length is 60 to 65 for proper
display. However, a few search engines allow fewer or more characters in a title.
Search engine spiders use these title tags as the main source for determining the web-page topic.
Spiders or crawlers examine the title, and the words used in it are then translated into the topic
of the page. That’s one reason it’s always best to use your keywords in your page title, and to use
them as close to the beginning of the title as possible. The text included in the title tag is also the
text that will appear in SERPs as the linked title on which users will click to access your page.
For example, if you have an informational web site that provides guidelines for choosing retirement
funds, and the most important keywords for your web site are “retirement funding” and “retirement
income,” then a page title (which is the text used in the title tag) along the lines of “Retirement
Funding Options to Increase Income,” is highly relevant to the topic of the site. Spiders will crawl
your site, and because the title tag is the first element encountered, the spider will “read” it and then
examine your site, as well as the keywords used in other places on your site (which you learn about
shortly), to determine how relevant the title is to the content of the site.

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Meta description tags and SEO

Meta description tags are also important for every page on your web site. In some search engine
results, the text beneath the linked title comes directly from the information
included in the meta description tag.

Despite the fact that not all search engines use the description included in the meta description
tags, all of them do read the description tag. They also use the description included there as one
of the factors considered during the ranking process.
The catch with meta description tags is that they work differently for different search engines. For
example, Google gives very little weight to meta descriptions. Instead, the Google search engine
looks at the text on a page. And on the SERPs, Google doesn’t display the meta description text
either. What does show is the content surrounding the instance of the keyword on your site.
Google calls this a snippet.

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