I have seen many people spending a lot of time and effort (some times even money) in designing Meta-title, description and keyword for their websites. If you are a ‘newbie SEO’ then you might goofed-up while writing your first meta data or you may be like to just outsource that work to some professional SEO agency. Experimenting with your sites meta data is good to get the hand-on experience  but it may not be good enough for your business website. Today I will  show  you the way of writing search engine optimized meta data for your site that will not only make the display of your (snippet) site in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) neat & clean but also make it informative to the search engines.

There are three types of meta-data fields that we will be discussing here namely, <Title>, <Description> & <Keywords>. I’m discussing each of them separately so that you can understand their do’s & dont’s better.

Meta – Title

Among all these meta data, the field ‘<title>’ is considered to be the most important factor which search engine giant Google gives the most importance. To be brief, its the key point that tell the search engine what that specific page is all about.  Its something like a ‘breaking news’ headlines in a news paper which gives us an idea about what that particular block of news is about. Now, there’s some rules you need to take care  of while writing your sites meta title.  You can always write a long, descriptive title for you site but out of that Google will only show the first 64 characters (with spaces) in its SERP.  So in order  to make it appear perfect in the result page like this one,  you need to limit your page title information within these 64 characters. Though it may look tough to compose an informative title inside this character limitation but it is really doable. Make it brief and to the point, strongly consider including your main targeted keyword inside the title. If you own a Pizza shop somewhere in the Gotham city and want to write a title for your website’s then it should be something like this – ‘Fresh Baked Pizza’s |Online Pizza |Gotham City‘ , considering the main keywords for this as ‘Fresh Pizza’ & ‘Online Pizza’ in a particular Gotham city. Its just an example, in real scenario you can try any number of permutation and combination to set the right title for your website. The main logic behind designing a search engine friendly title lies in coining the words/ keywords inside the  title in such a way that it can cover multiple search queries. For instance, the above example can cover multiple search queries like ‘Fresh Pizzas’, ‘Online Pizza’, ‘Online Pizza Gotham City’ etc.

Meta- Description

If title is the first preference  for a search engine to determine the relevancy of a web-page, then the next is its description. A <description> field provide the search engines the brief description about the page. Remember the newspaper headline example ? If the headlines where the page title, the first few lines beneath it is the description.  The Google’s character limitation for the <description> field is 159 characters. If you limit your description information within this limit, the search engines will show the full description in the SERP. You can always make your description field much more informative and go beyond the prescribed character limit, it will not cause any harm to your SEO effort only that the search engine will show the first 159 characters of your description field. It is again strongly recommended to use your main keyword once or twice inside our description if you are following the 159 characters guidelines along with a secondary keyword. It must be simple, straightforward and informative.

Meta – Keyword

This is the third most important factor in regard of SEO and page meta information. Keywords or key-phrases are the words or phrases that a user use while searching for something in particular. In the Pizza shop example, the phrase ‘Fresh Pizza’ is a key-phrase that a user will type in the Google’s search box to get the best result out of it. It is a wide spread practice to use Google’s keyword tool to determine keywords for a website. There are some other keyword analysis tool is also there, free & easy to operate.  It is recommended to use 10-20 keyword, key-phrases sorted according to priority (primary kw, secondary kw) inside the <keyword> field.

You can do your own research in this aspect to find out more about this topic. Learn how the stuffs work and enjoy.
Cheers :)