subject: Debunking The Myths About Titles And Meta Description [print this page] While youre not about to receive another prattle from SEO wannabes who only write articles for the sake of stuffing their sites with keywords, beware of these common blunders that most of the beginners believe about titles and meta descriptions:
1.Including your keyword in your meta tags is necessary
The truth here is that even if you just put a song lyric in the tag, it wont affect your rankings, not even a bit. So if youre being too conscious whether your tag contains the keyword or not, you might be missing out the big picture. The best SEO practitioners know that they are used only for comprehension purposes. On the other hand, though it may not affect your rankings, always remember that your goal is here is to court clients, not virtual spiders. So make sure to put something sensible in your descriptions.
2.The keyword order doesnt count in headings
Whoever gives you this idea is certainly not a true-blue SEO. Of all things, the first word of your header will be the greatest factor of your on-page optimization. The principle of first come first serve applies, and your chances of being searched in the great online limbo will definitely increase when you use the first slot to your advantage. Fill it with the most important idea in the page, or at the very least, make the term connected to your theme. And dont settle for lazy first terms like a or the. Duh.
3.You will be penalized if you repeat the same tag across different pages
The answer is obvious: no. Since meta descriptions are of no effect in your rankings, you dont have to bother if repeating tags onto different pages is legal or not. But beware, however, though your web site wont go into brimstones, hellfire, and eternal damnation as a punishment, repeating the same phrases over and over like a broken record wont win you serious visitors either.
4.Pages with Title tags of more than 12 words cannot be read by Google
Some say its 70 characters, others 66. But nobody said that your title wont be crawled by Google at all when you exceed the length. Yes, its true that the value of each term dilutes when your primary tag is too long, but the purpose of limiting your words or characters in the heading is to ensure that it will be read by humans. After a certain length of string, you will observe that search engines cut the header with an ellipsis. Thats the main reason why you need to limit your title, not for some shady SEO tricks.
Algorithms are smart, or at least, the people who formulated them. Use your titles and meta descriptions to maximize your ranking, not to pull you down. Remember that you must not easily believe in the lure of SEO tricksters if you dont want to end up frustrated, chasing good rankings with your superstitious knowledge, but to no avail.
