I just read a good article about writers block, and with a view to blogging it, pondered for ages on the title…!

Here’s the article - getting the right copy’s essential for your site, but this guide helps us realise that it’s normal to sit down witgh a blank screen and feel fear

http://www.copyblogger.com/writers-block/

In the early days of the internet, the meta ‘keyword’ tag was the most important information used by some early search engines to determine relevance hence ranking. However, that was the past. Now, the keyword tag is ignored by most search engines due to the abuse. It doesn’t take too much imagination to realise that people could literally cram their ‘meta’ area with all sorts of information utterly irrelevant to the content itself.

So it doesn’t matter if you use the keyword meta tag or not. However, if you do include, do remember be careful not to repeat any word and include only your most important keywords - those that you actually use in the content.

The meta tag that you should be concerned about is the Meta Description Tag.

Here’s how the meta tag looks like when you view the page’s source code:

<meta name=”description” content=”One or two sentences to describe the page consisting of keywords”>

The words in the description will be used by the search algorithm to have a snapshot of your web page. Furthermore, major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search results are displaying this description when you used the keywords here (see left).

This is important because a well written description will attract the search to click and come to your web site. This small but important detail is often overlooked by most webmasters and web designers.

An extensive how-to guide on achieving opacity through CSS3. Opacity, (like rounded corners) is one of those features that really helps to make a website feel modern (at the moment!) - it’s only just emerging in a form that can be used compliantly in all browsers. Hoorah!

Click here to read the guide

The title tag carries more weight than any other HTML tags as far as on-page Search Engine Optimisation is concerned.

In HTML source, look for Title Tag:
<title>Title of web page consisting keywords</title>
near the top of the file. Visually, it appears at the top of the browser window (see below).
All the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search place emphasis on the words that appear in the title tag.

The spiders use these words to determine what the rest of your page is about. The title bar should consist of words that describe your page and should include the most important keywords or phrases.

You should check all the title tags of your web pages. Each title bar should be unique and descriptive. I usually use between three to ten words in the title tag to indicate what the page is about.

Unique title tag is liken to the numbering of each unit in a building - imagine the confusion when you walking into an apartment block with same number at every unit!

Tips for writing your Title Tag

• Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.
• As the text within the title tag will be used in the listing of your Web site in the search engine results, it is important that your title bar sounds interesting enough for searcher to click at it.

I’m starting to put together a few guides to help shatter some of the myths about Search Engine Optimisation.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases are what people type into search engines.  It follows that if your site is understood by the search engines to have a lot of ‘answers’ relavant to the person doing the search, you’re more likely to be higher in the search rankings, and hence there’s more chance they’ll click through to you.

Keyword density is a measure of how many times your targeted keyword or keyphrase is being used in the content of your web page.

By repeating your important keyword - or keyword phrase, your increase the prominence of those words to the search engines. This will help the search engines to identify your target keyword and rank the web page accordingly.

However, search engines aren’t daft; they penalise sites (by ranking them lower) if they keyword-stuff or use the same keyword phrase too many times in an unnatural way.

Repeating identical keywords or phrases for more than three times in the body of the the page may actually damage than good as far as the search engine algorithm is concerned.  There is an optimum level you should aim for.  You should also aim to use words with similar meaning - just like when you write naturally. Search engines are smart enough to recognise synonyms and variations such as man, men, male, boy, boys, masculine and etc.

In each page, focus on one or two keywords but not more than three keywords so that it is apparent to the search engine what your page is about.

Keyword Positioning

As much as possible, use the keyword or keyword phrase in the heading of the page, in the first sentence of the first paragraph and near the bottom of the page.  Bold or <header>  tagged keywords help, too.

As a rule of thumb, your most important keywords - the exact phrase should not be repeated for more than 3% of the total word count. If you have a 500 words page, keep the keywords count to less than 15 times.