Ideally, the Title tag should contain a small number, some say three to eight and others, five to ten good, descriptive words and not exceed 60-80 characters. Make it human readable with the primary keyword as close to the start of the title as possible. This verbiage will most likely be the title of your page in the search engine results.

• Don't start your Title with the site name, put the name at the end (i.e. This is my really cool, relevant title - company name)
• Don't repeat the same word multiple times in the title.
• The title of the page is the most important ranking criteria for search engines, so make the most of it.
• Don't use all uppercase letters.
• You can code accentuated letters in HTML (é = é).
• Your page title must be 7 to 10 words long and must contain important and descriptive words for your activity.
• Don't use titles like: "Homepage", "Welcome on our web site". They don't describe your activity and what the end user will find in your pages.
• Do, Create unique titles for every page of your site that is representative of its content.
• Of course, every page of your site must have a title... :-)
• Don't make lists of words separated by commas: write a real sentence.
• Don't begin your title with a space.

Meta - Keywords

Meta - Description

Page Copy

Content (visible copy) weighs heavily and is considered one of the primary areas of search engine optimization and marketing "Content is King". Your content should be written in a way that grabs the users attention, while utilizing your targeted keywords and keyword phrases. There is a method to placement of the keywords and keyword phrases that will help your web site gain better placement in the search engines. Balance is essential and creating that balance takes knowledge and experience.

You should make it your goal to add at least one new page of content daily if possible. If not, then once a week is acceptable. You want to keep your website content fresh and give your visitors something to come back for on their next visit. Stale website content may not perform as well as fresh website content. I strongly suggest that you utilize last modified dates on your pages so that visitors to your site know when the page was last modified and how fresh the content is.

Do's and Don'ts for Page Copy:

• Alt Tags filled out for every image. (see Alt Copy below for more guidelines)
• First paragraph of copy should contain keywords, in singular and plural version, more than once, but separated by other words, make real, meaningful sentences, with slight over-use of keywords.
• Meaningful links, no more "click here" or "more information" links. Link the WORD or words, preferably including the keyword if not too redundant.
• Each page should contain content that is about one of your most profitable keywords. As you write the page, you focus upon using this keyword slightly more than you would normally use the word, but not so much as to be obvious and obnoxious.
• There are also general keywords - the more generic words that are associated with your specific keywords. For example, if your specific keyword is "search engine optimization," your general keywords would be "placement," "ranking," "positioning," "promotion," etc.
• You'll never be successful in optimization campaign for general keywords by themselves - there is just too much competition. Even if you win, the traffic is just too non-targeted to be interested in your specific niche. Use compound words to hone in on your niche: horse is very generic, but reining horse enthusiasts is very specific
• Mix some general words in with your keywords to help with compound searches. You only need to include them once or twice - you're not trying to get top ranking for general keywords. You are interested in combinations of general keywords with the specific one, which bring excellent, highly targeted visitors. Mistakes I have made in the past for example: Using RV Maintenance when I really wanted to focus on RV interior storage. Maintenance is too general and you will get folks wanting to maintain their chassis and don't care about internal organization of their RV.

Alt Copy

Alt text is the line of text you see pop up (in Internet Explorer, see note below) when you place your cursor over an image. It also displays a text representation of the image when the user has images turned off in their browser (this is the intended behavior). It is highly recommended that you utilize this area as it is required under accessibility laws and, is indexed by the search engines.

Alt tags should have relevent keywords or phrases. The alt text should mirror the content of the image. If it is a graphic header, then your alt text should mirror the text in the graphic header. Do not use all caps here either. You should never use all caps, it is rude and spammish. Alt text values should not exceed 80 characters in length. If more than 70-80 characters are required one should use the longdesc attribute as an alternative to alt text.

If you develop your own websites and use a database, force the input of Title and Description, you will love it! I created a table called Meta that stores these fields. If I want to do a scan of my formatting and verify the quality, I can just run a SQL query. It also allows for quick updates.

Another trick that we have used is for large sites where it is hard to get folks to fill in the information, use something relevent on the page as its title and description so they are not completely empty, I.E. we have a very large product catalog and the Product Name is the title and the Products Short Description goes in the Meta Description.

Finally, be very sure that your content management interface gives users easy access to Meta-title and Meta Description. This way there is NO excuse to miss it. Better yet, do what I have done, if you create a page it will NOT work unless those two fields are populated.