You have good content and an awesome looking website, but you are still unable to rank high on the search engine? Its time you work on the title tag and meta description. In the highly competitive Internet market title tag and meta description have become the heart and soul of good search engine optimization. Your competitors will stay ahead of you on the search engine if you do not leverage the search engines with the use of good title tag and meta description. Let us now look into title tag and meta description in detail.

Title Tag

The Title Tag is an HTML code that shows the words that appear in the Title bar at the top of your web browser. Occasionally this title tag may be the same as the title of your post. Title tag is one of the most important elements of on-page optimization in SEO. It serves dual purposes – It communicates the theme of your web page to the visitors at the same time attracts the search engine crawlers to give good ranking to the website.

A title tag should be carefully done as it appears on the search engine results, the headline of your page. When a visitor has to sort between tens of results for particular keywords the most attractive title tag usually emerges as the winner. It also serves as the headline when you bookmark a certain page to promote it. Title tag shouldn’t be too long, not exceeding 85-90 characters. It should be crisp and catchy to hook the visitor at one go.

Meta Description

Meta description is a part of HTML code that allows you to give a short and concise summary of your web page content. The words and the phrases appearing in the meta description are used in search engine result pages (SERP). Search any keyword in a search engine and see the brief description that appears below the title tag in the results, that’s the meta description.

A well written meta description gives you the opportunity to insert relevant keywords which will attract the search engine results and make your page more visible in the search engines. Avoid spamming it with irrelevant keywords and phrases as this might attract penalty from the search engines. A good meta description should not exceed 250- 300 characters including spaces.

Title tag and meta description are no rocket science. They are logical usage of words and phrases to attract search engine traffic.

Summary: Title tag and meta description are very important elements in your webpage. They make the page look attractive at the same time make it more search engine friendly.