“I would like to ask a question about SEO. How do you write proper title, keyword, description tag for a website. Can you provide some examples of how to write a proper one?” - Kelvin Tan
Hi Kelvin,
There are two considerations in writing those tags. The first one is the SEO aspect and the second one is the marketing aspect. I’ll cover both of them in this reply.
1) The technical aspect of writing SEO friendly title, keyword and description tags
For the beginners, let me show you where to find the title, keyword and description tags in a typical html code.
Title tag -
Keyword tag -
Description tag -
Search engines now place little importance to keyword and description tag. But as a good practice, it’s always good to include the keyword phrase in the keyword and description tags.
For example, if I’m trying to optimize a page for “debt reduction strategies”, my keyword and description tags will be as follow:
Keyword tag -
Description tag -
Technically speaking, you can put any ‘meat’ to fill the rest of the description tag. For me, I simply use the first sentence of my article as the description tag, since the first sentence of my article will always consist of the keyword phrase (another good SEO practice).
In SEO, what is more important is the title tag.
Technically, your title tag should try to meet the following requirements:
i) Your title tag must have the ‘exact’ keyword phrase in it.
I don’t have to explain this one, do I?
ii) Your title tag should preferably be as short as possible.
There is such a thing called keyword dilution in SEO. It means if there are too many words in your title, the importance of your main keyword phrase will be ‘diluted’ in the eyes of the search engines. So try to keep your title short.
To illustrate, if my keyword phrase is “debt reduction strategies”, some examples of a good title include
- Debt Reduction Strategies
- 7 Debt Reduction Strategies
- Pitfalls and Traps of Debt Reduction Strategies
- Creative Debt Reduction Strategies
I didn’t think of these titles. These are the top 4 titles returned by Google search.
2) The marketing aspect of writing the title tag
Your title tag is very important, not only for SEO but also for human.
Why?
Because when someone does a search, he/she will first see the title in the search result.
Therefore, when writing a title, besides making sure that it fulfills the SEO requirements, you also have to do your best to write something that can entice people to click.
This is the marketing aspect of writing a good title tag, something that is hard to teach my freelance writers. 
Notes On Description Tag
Search engines will show your description tag as the description in the search result. (Thanks to our member Proson for pointing this out.)
This means if you want to perfect a page, you should try to write something enticing in your description tag as well.
For me, I usually don’t bother. I only make sure that the exact keyword phrase is present in the description tag. That will be enough for SEO purpose.
(guest post by Kenneth Koh)
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