WebsiteX5.info - The ultimate guide for Incomedia's WebsiteX5

Your content
Search engines don't only look at the meta tags and the description of your pages, it will also analyze your content to check if your content is relevant and in line with the meta tags, the title and the description. If, for example the title contains words which are also present in the content this will influence your page rank in a positive manner. The same is true for the meta keywords.

Why are the title, the description and the meta keywords important?
When you do a search, the search engine will use the meta keywords to find relevant websites. The results are then presented. The title of your website or webpage is used as the link to your site (on Google the blue line of text). Then the description is shown (in black) and on the next line the url of the page is displayed (in green).

(It is a matter of discussion what the value of the keywords are. Some search engines use the key words. Other search engines also use relevant words which are found in the content of the page to index their page).

Title, description and keywords in WebsiteX5
It may be a surprise, but the title of your website is one of the most important thing in optimizing your website. You should really think about what title you give to your website and to your pages. A title like 'My Website' of just your company name isn't sufficient. It should reflect what you want to achieve with your site.

For example your companies name is Barbara's Toys and you want to sell hand made dolls. When people want to buy a handmade doll they will do a search on these words. When you choose ´Barbara´s Toys´ as the name of all the pages chances are the search result will be ignored. But when your title is ´Beautiful handmade dolls for an affordable price by Barbara` changes will be a lot better that a potential visitor will click on the search result. You could also choose ´Handmade dolls, wooden carts and other durable toys´, leaving out your companies name all together. How many people will do a search on just your company's name?

Keep your titles short and inviting. Use a maximum of about 75 characters. It should fit on one line of the screen when you test the website.

Description
Search engines will use the description as well to index your page, so it is important that your description reflects your page. Include the most important keywords in your description But even more important is, that the description will often be the first contact with your website for your visitors. Take a look at the Google example, the black texts are the descriptions. These aren't just lists, crammed with keywords, but short and inviting descriptions of the page.

The description is the value of the meta tag 'description'
<meta name="description" content="This is the description…" />

Google only shows the first 200 characters of the description of the page. Keep this value as a maximum length.

Keywords
It is important to choose your keywords with care! Too many keywords aren't good either. With meta keyword it seems to be that 'less is more' . Important is that keywords should be page specific, not site specific. If you have one page with handmade dolls and one page with wooden carts then somebody who is looking for handmade dolls can find you, but also people who want to buy a wooden cart.

Use multiple keywords. Most people do their searching on more than one keyword.

Watch out for keywords which are 'blacklisted'. Keyword of a pornographic nature or which are discriminating or offending are blacklisted, but keyword like 'free', 'guestbook' and 'forum' as well...

The meta keywords is the value of the meta tag 'keywords'.
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, etc" />

A wise remark!
When in doubt, remember this cardinal rule: More isn't better in SEO. When in doubt, leave it out. You may rank lower if you include too few keywords in your META tags or don't include important keywords in your TITLE tag. But if you include too many keywords, you may not rank at all. Don't take that chance with your SEO.