Keep your title tags short and pertinent

The title tag (the description that appears on the top of the browser) of your site is one of the most important factors determining the search engine results position (SERP).

There are two common mistakes, however, the people commit when creating the title tag. The first one is to use a single title, usually the blog name, for all the pages throughout the site. This must be avoided because the title of a page should match the content inside it.

Suppose you are using the title “John Doe’s Blog” on all the pages. Even if you have a post talking about “The New PlayStation 3″ the title tag for this post will be “John Doe’s Blog”, which is not very effective (because there is no match on the keywords). A much better title would be “The New PlayStation 3″, that is exactly equal to the post name rather than the blog name.

The second mistake that people commit is to include too many keywords on the title tag, hoping that search engines will take all of them into consideration. Have you ever seen a title like this: “Tech Blog - where you find resources for blogs, websites, technology, internet, applications, software, hardware, and pretty much everything else!”

This should also be avoided because search engines put a value on title keywords depending on the total number of keywords. The result is that the higher the number of keywords you have on the title the smaller the value that will be attributed to each one of them.

A good title tag, therefore, should be short (no more than 4 or 5 keywords) and pertinent to the content inside the page.

Update: You can find the actual code I use on the article “Optimal Title Tag for Wordpress“.

Always use the ALT tag

The ALT tag, sometimes referred as the alternative tag, goes inside image codes to tell search engines what the image is about. An example of an ALT tag is:

Many people forget to add the ALT tag to images, and some ignore it altogether. This is a mistake because the ALT tag is used by search engines not only to identify images but also for keyword density purposes.

The next time you place an image on your site do not forget to add the ALT tag with a couple of keywords pertinent to the image and to the content of the page.

Update: Equally important is the title tag inside the image code, some browsers (including some versions of Firefox) will not take into consideration the ALT tag, therefore having a title tag should make you more secure.

SEO techniques to be avoided

The Google Blogoscoped blog has an interesting article covering the basics of search engine optimization. There are some basic guidelines for making your blog more search engine friendly, with tips about writing original stuff, making the posts accessible and spreading the word about your site.

The most useful part, however, is the final checklist on SEO techniques that should be avoided, check it out:

1. Don’t stuff too many keywords into places where they don’t belong
2. Don’t optimize for search engines at the cost of human visitors; if someone told you adding a dash to the domain name helps your rankings, but you feel that dash might confuse your customers, then don’t add it
3. Don’t trust people who promise you “instant #1 ranking”, “guaranteed top 10 positions” or anything of the sort
4. Don’t link to others from your site just because they promised a link back to you
5. Don’t link to others just because they paid you, unless you know exactly what you’re doing (i.e. you know about “bad neighborhoods” the “nofollow” attribute, PageRank, JavaScript-ads vs text links, what it means to get googleaxed and so on)
6. Don’t create multiple pages with exactly the same content
7. Don’t “litter” your URL on other people’s sites (and don’t let others people “litter” URLs on your site; if you have a web forum, keep it spam-free)
8. Don’t invest in a cheap server that won’t be able to cope with your traffic; don’t build your whole site on free website tools only – if you want to have a high-quality site & server, you need to pay for it
9. Don’t worry about a page’s meta descriptions, meta keywords and such; your time is better spent creating content
10. Don’t use tools that automatically submit your site’s URL to directories, search engines and such
11. Don’t present different content to search engines than you present to users; for example, don’t hide your text to visitors and show it to search engines
12. Don’t “over-optimize”; relax, if search engines required webmasters to heavily optimize, they’d be doing a very bad job
13. In general, don’t try to outsmart search engines (unless perhaps you intend to dedicate your life to that task); those maintaining search engines are paid to outsmart webmaster tricks, so in the long run, chances for successful tricks are low

Optimize your Meta Description Tag

The Meta Description Tag (placed between the head and /head tags) is used by some search engines to create the snippets of text that you see right below the results on search queries. It does not carry any weight in the search algorithm of Google, but it does carry a certain weight for Yahoo and other smaller search engines so you should not neglect it altogether.

One problem with the Meta Description Tag of most websites is that it is static. People usually include a general description about the site, which is suitable only to the home page. Should a visitor find an internal page (say a single post) through a search engine the tag will be the same, containing no information about the content of that internal page whatsoever.

In order to optimize your Meta Description Tag you should make it dynamic, making sure that it will include the first few lines of text of every single page on your site. A very simple way to do this under the Wordpress platform is to make the Description tag equal to the post excerpt, like the code below illustrates.

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Alternatively you can download a plugin called Head META Description. Just upload the plugin, activate it and insert the following line on your header:

The plugin will generate the Meta Description automatically, either by extracting the first words of your posts or by displaying the post excerpt (you can configure it).