Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics - Step 3
From Leading Australian Professional - Anthony Parsons

The information I am providing is a logical solution for basic concepts to be applied within your website pages. I warn you now, do not think that stuffing terms into any area of a page will improve your rankings. It will have the opposite effect in actual fact. If you think your the first to try it, think again. It has been done, it has been recorded and it is most likely included in the search engines algorithm to penalise for it. If you apply these concepts correctly as I state, then together with all the features I show throughout this series, your website can obtain and maintain a steady high ranking across the (3) main search engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN).

Title

<title>Put Keywords Describing Your Page In Here, Not Other Rubbish</title>

You need to forget about making your page title look good with your business name and get your keywords within it. The page title describes to the engines what the page is about, for example this page, "Search Engine Optimization Basics - Meta and Heading Optimization", describes what the engines will find upon this page. Notice how I said "this page"? If you notice on the first page of this series, you will find a heading that says "Search Engine Optimization Basics - Introduction". The reason for that is each page title should be unique to that page, not a blanket affect across the site from laziness.

Title length

This has been a hot debate for some time now. Some say 65 characters, some 100! Lets try something different and apply commonsense. The best method to find out, is perform a search and count the characters of the larger titles displayed upon the search engine results page until they're not displayed further "...". Too simple isn't it? For example:

Google counts first 66 characters including spaces
Yahoo counts first 117 characters including spaces
MSN counts first 117 characters including spaces when I gave up

Last problem. Do you go maximum or minimum? The answer is both. Your important phrases must fit within the first 66 characters, then you can include some very non-competitive term/s or your business name in the remainder for Yahoo and MSN. So, my title for this page could be:

<title>Search Engine Optimization Basics - Meta and Heading Optimization by Anthony Parsons, Australian SEO Professional</title>

Description

<meta name="description" content="Informative content only goes in here, not word, word, word, word...">

Contrary to some beliefs, the description is still used by the major engines. The engines take parts of your page text that match the query and present that as your description <snippet> within the results pages, however, when the page lacks sufficient content, the description is used in place. A simple rule of thumb is this, if you write your title in a structured context, then you can simply insert the title as the beginning of the description, so all your keyword phrases are within the first part of the description, then just add a little more substance to it.

Description Length

Lets once again use commonsense and go to the engines for the direct scoop. Count the maximum description length under the title for a given result:

Google counts first 150 characters including spaces
Yahoo counts first 330 characters including spaces
MSN counts first 330 characters including spaces

As with the title, you need to get all your important phrases included in that first 150 characters. When the terms are found directly within your description, the chances of click through are increased if the term is contained as it will be shown in bold, which jumps out to the user. As has been clearly demonstrated to you, your purely wasting your time with anything over 330 characters.

<meta name="description" content="Search Engine Optimization Basics, Meta and Heading Optimization by Anthony Parsons, Australian SEO Professional. Link Optimization, SEO Copywriting and other purely organic techniques are what you’ll find...">

Keywords

Quite honestly, include it if your wish or leave it out. The major engines do not use it anymore. Most meta engines don't even use it. Personally, I include it just for good measure and only include the title within the keywords. It doesn't matter if you include spaces after the comma, no spaces, no commas, it is irrelevant and mostly garbage that people make up to try and sound important or impress you. Don't be fooled, as it is a near worthless tag from this point forward.

Other Meta Information

Quite honestly you really see some rubbish placed within that <head> section at times. I think it stems from one person seeing another site, so they feel that person must know something they don't, hence they include all these other rubbish statements and have a <head> section a mile long with rubbish. I am here to tell you, you don't need robots tags or files unless you need to specifically stop the engines and other bots from going somewhere you don't want them. Get rid of it. All the copyright and design information, lose it. You only need the raw basics as above plus the required RASCI statement and then DOCTYPE at the absolute beginning of the document code. The only other information you should find in the head section is the CSS and Scripts locations. All good designers and SEO's put all scripts external to their pages. But you knew that didn't you?

Conclusion

So there you have the basic requirements to constructing your required meta and page headings. As you can see for yourself, its not hard, you don't require any special meta tools to build it, when in actual fact those free meta tools tend to be the ones that add all the rubbish that you just don't need. Commonsense takes you a long way with SEO and the correct construction of your pages. People get impatient and want to hurry things along. If you can't have patience, then chances are your lost to the dark side already and going to have a life of fighting the engines, being penalised, banned and domains rendered useless. Stay with the strict guidelines of the search engines, and you will actually find it is easier to work with them, than against them. Further articles in this series will teach you to develop your skill set to apply set principles correctly to form a complete solid and stable package as an end result.