14 Tactics to Make Your Website Work Harder Right Now: Tactic 5 - Meta Tags and Titles (This Won't Hurt a Bit)

A few hours spent writing unique titles and descriptions for each page of your site is insignificant compared to the increase in traffic that results. Page titles tell the search engines what your site is about, and meta descriptions give searchers something compelling to click on in the search engine results pages. Additionally, using keywords in your <Title> tags further boosts each page's calculated relevance to a particular subject.

What's that? You haven't done any keyword research yet? That's no excuse. Do the exercise anyway and use your best judgment based on each page's existing content. This is where writing for the long tail comes in handy. If you are unfamiliar with this subject, check out Matt Bailey's article, Keyword Strategies - The Long Tail.

By the way, if your web developer proudly shows you a long list of keywords typed into the keyword meta tag, well, you know what I always say in these situations: take your money and run really really fast back to the bank. Keyword meta tags were used and abused for years. As a result, most search engines don't put much stock into them. Time is precious. Spend it on something useful.

A good rule of thumb: if a monkey can do it, it's probably not going to help your site do better in the rankings! And a monkey can't make strategic decisions about the best two or three key phrases to place in your title tags. Nor can a monkey write a compelling yet concise description of what each page of your site is about.

Now get cracking. You've only got a few hours.