Q&A from a client:
Questions:
Titles - should each page have it's own unique title, or should it replicate
the main page and then add additional info. i.e. should it be 'contact us'
or 'Company Name... - contact us'? If it's just 'contact us' that
wouldn't be differentiable from any of the millions of other 'contact us'
pages on the web, correct?
Search Engineer Answers:
The home page is more important than others wrt getting
important keywords in the title within the
number-of-characters limit. For other basic pages (contact
us, about us, etc.), we would probably opt for something like
"Comapny Name - Contact Us", etc., as you suggest. I wouldn't
repeat the word "Comapny Name" on *every* page because search
engines respect original, non-repeating content -- even in
titles. So if you have a page with a good research article,
use the title of article as the HTML title.
Btw, search engines differ in terms of *how many title-tag
characters* they deem "acceptable". That said, W3's
guidelines are as close to "official" as one can get:
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/TITLE.html
Question:
Keywords - same thought as above. Should each page have
it's own set of keywords, use the main keywords only, or a combination
of the two?
Search Engineer Answers:
If you have the time, use page-specific keywords.
Question:
My
thinking was that if they had the same keywords as the index page, Google
could point someone to any of our sub-pages which would be less than ideal.
Likewise, if each page ONLY had keywords related to it, you run into the
'contact us' situation from above.
Search Engineer Answers:
We agree with your reasoning.
If one is talking about *meta* keywords tag, here are the
"rules":
(1) keep your list of keywords or keyword phrases down to 10
- 15 unique words or phrases
(2) separate the words or phrases using a comma (you do not
need to leave a space between words separated by commas)
(3) do not repeat words or phrases
(4) put your most important word or phrases at the beginning
of your list
Realistically, *meta* keywords are *no longer* significant
to search engine optimization. Keywords (important words)
used in the title or the description tag should be repeated
a few times in the page content (i.e. the body).
The meta *description* tag is more important than meta
keywords. Here are the "rules":
(1) limit it to 170 characters or 200 characters;
(2) pick a style and be consistent throughout your pages
(3) writing a unique description for each page of your site
For more info, see:
http://www.seologic.com/faq/meta-descriptions.php
Client Comments:
Thanks for the input. Now I just need to improve some of those Google
rankings :)
Getting your site into DMOZ will help with that (we submitted
your site to this all-important directory some time ago). Other than that, and perhaps
more critical, one should regularly and continuously add new
content to a site. Search engines pay much more attention to
frequently-updated web sites. A general rule of thumb is to
add one new page to a web site every few days; the page
doesn't have to be long.
Content is ultimately *much* more important than meta tags
or title tweaks.
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