Search Engine Optimization - Meta tags and title

Amongst page title, meta description, meta keywords, page title is the most important. However, the other two shouldn't be ignored also so never forget to put these in your website!

Page Title:

Page title tells the search engine what your page is about. Moreover, the title of your page will appear on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Many sites put "Welcome to ABC's company website!". This tells the search engine nothing but your company name and definitely not beneficial to the searchability of your site. Since the text in the beginning are always the most important, if you really need to put your company name in the page title, please try to put it at the end. I would avoid words like "ABC company homepage" or "Welcome" but put in important and relevant keywords (should also appear in your body text of your page) that you page is about.

Put as much keywords (don't repeat keywords too much, as search engine will discard your keywords if they appear too often) as you can in your page title. Make sure these keywords are highly relevant to your website's content. One thing to keep in mind, don't exceed 65 characters for your page title. This is a maximum limit most search engine can truncate to.

Meta Description:

Although less search engines are utilizing the meta description on the SERP, some are still showing the meta description under the title in the SERP and that's why you should not be missing the meta description in your webpages. You can control what is the description of your site to be shown to the web surfers by using a meta description (for those search engines which are still utilizing the information) . Remember to place the important keywords together at the beginning of your meta description.

Nowadays, most serach engine uses the 200 characters appear near the keyword in your web page in the Snippet (The description of your site show to the web surfer on the SERP under your page title). Yahoo still utilizes the Meta description. Please do keep in mind, Google's snippet is shorter, around 100-150 characters long. Whereas Yahoo allows longer snippet with 150-200 characters. However, to design one that fits all, be precise and keep your meta description/ important idea around your keyword in your body text at around 150 characters.

Meta Keywords:

Many search engines are no longer utilizing the meta keyword tag, but yes, a few still do. When you put in the keyword tag, do not put in more than 20 keywords or key phrases separated by a comma. Make sure these keywords are relevant and descriptive of what your site is talking about.