Hi, I would like some help with title, meta description and keywords for my site. which is a vbulletin forum similar to dp but mine is about education. will appreciate regards
Meta title, description and keywords are very important for any website and it play vital role to rank your website and to get good traffic.
meta keyword elements have absolutely ZERO affect on SEO. It does NOT help your site rank at any of the 3 major engines. Meta description won't help you rank at Google either. The meta desription is however important in that IF you can get Google to show it as the snippet in the SERPs AND it has a good "call to action" then it can increase click-thru-rate. And the title element is not a meta title. If the HTML element does not start with meta then it's not a meta element. @OP Try to keep your title elements short and very focused and relelvant to the topic of the page. I would highly recommend NOT including your site name in the title. The most the search engiens are going to show in the SERPs is about 65 characters of your title. It can be much longer and they still use all of the title for ranking, but it should be rare that you need more than 65 characters. Once you have optimized the title, create meta descriptions that use most or all of the keyword phrases from the title element. If your meta description contains ALL of the keywords from a user's search phrase, Google will typically show it as the snippet. If not then they will typically construct their own snippet from sentence fragments from the page that contain the keywords from the search phrase. Try to limit the meta description to about 145-150 characters unless the targeted keyword phrase for the page is very long-tail. Then Google can sometimes show several hundred characters as the snippet. Now days, most professional SEOs recommend not even including the meta keywords element as it can only hurt you (if you stuff it with a bunch of keyword phrases) and will never help your rankings.
never go over 20 keywords, that's max for a keyword meta tag. use those same keywords in description, title and the body of your site, that's how to do it, use google keyword tools find a low or medium competition key phrase and use that in your title, one that has a lot of traffic.
I had this debate at some point with someone around here and found a bunch with 71 lol... Having said that, Canonical is one of a very small handful of folks around here that actually knows whats going on. Happy New Year Jim Nigel
Go to Keyword tools find what keywords you want to use. Put " " around those words in the google search box. See how many sites come up. If there is 250,000 or less and that keyord gets 30,000 searches a month. Then that would be a great keyord you would want to optimize for.
Canonical is providing a lot of good advice, follow it! I would like to add that you should also do some keyword research around the subject of your site ("education" is quite broad"), not so much for the title of meta-keywords (again, little to add to what Canonical advises) but rather for your link building.