Every page title and meta description on your site is enormously important, from the point of view of both the search engines and your readers.  Always use your top keywords in each one of your web pages – it signals to the search engines as well as your readers what that page is about. Firstly in the title tags of your page you should use your top 2 or 3 keywords or phrases. If you are unsure what a title tag is, it is clearly visible at the top of the browser window. The title tags are incredibly important. As I said before it signals to the search engines what the page is about. In my opinion the title tags should not exceed 75-80 characters.

Secondly The meta description tag tends to get overlooked far too much. It’s one of those SEO things that usually gets left to the last minute. Like the title tag a descriptive meta tag signals to the search engines and your readers what that page is about. When someone does a search on Google they’ll scan through the page titles and descriptions. Search engines, especially Google, will display the description you wrote in the meta description if the search term being used can be found exactly in the meta description you wrote. If you do not do this Google will crawl your site and just take the first bit of content it finds and place it there. By thinking out the outlay and terminology you use in the meta description tag you can boost your rankings. With regards to length I would not exceed 200 characters.

And thirdly the meta keywords. Personally I do not believe that search engines give this area the credence it once did. In the past people would just cram this area with as many keywords that they could find related to their site but this just does not work anymore. However, this area should still not be avoided. My recommendation would be to place your keywords in this area but do not exceed 250 characters in length.

Does your domain name affect your search engine ranking? In my experience, the domain name has an enormous impact. However, this is certainly important if you are creating a new site and attacking a competitive market. However many of you will already have sites up and running that do not contain a keyword rich domain name so do not worry as it is more than possible to rank highly without a keyword rich domain name.  One variable that modern search engines consider when determining which of the thousands – or millions – of results should be presented in the top slots is definitely the domain name of the site. The main advantages of having keywords in your domain name, are that you can legitimately include them in contact details and links to other sections of your site and the title of your site. What someone may consider a good domain name and what in reality is in most instances 2 different things. Now I will give you an example of this:

Mr Smith is creating a site that is going to sell vacuum cleaners. His business name might be Smiths machines and logically he may have that specifc domain. However it would be more advantages to have a domain name containing the term vacuum cleaners. For example vacuumcleaners4u.com or vacuumcleanersstore.com depending on what is available.

Finally I would like to add please take into consideration where you host your site. If you have a site selling predominantly to the Uk or US market you should make sure that the site is hosted in that country. So if a have a site hosted in the US but you are targeting the UK it is not in your interests to have it this way as the search engines will perceive it as a US site.