SEO Best Practice for Page Titles, Metadata and Metakeywords
Page titles, metadata and metakeywords are all important elements in their own way when it comes to search engine optimization. They are also relatively simple to develop and implement, however, not everyone employ these elements correctly. I have put together a quick cheat cheat that outlines everything from maximum character length to total impact of page titles, metadata and metakeywords.
Page Title:
Maximum Length: 63 Characters (including spaces)
Format: Description with Keywords – Site Name
What they are: Page titles appear in the top of a user’s browser window. Page titles also appear in the link text on search engine result pages.
Meta-keywords:
Maximum Length: 256 Characters (including spaces and commas)
Format: Each keyword or keywords should be separated by comma. Each keyword is only to be used one. Although you have a 256 character maximum to work with, all 256 characters do not have to be used.
What they are: Although not weighted very heavily in modern search engine algorithms, meta-keywords do provide search engines with one more element to describe the page.
Meta-description:
Maximum Length: 156 Characters (including spaces)
Format: This should be a short summary of what that specific web page is about. It should only be single sentence.
What they are: Like meta-keywords, meta-descriptions are not taken into great account by search engine algorithms. However, they are more important than meta-keywords. This is because, meta-descriptions, if properly implemented, will be displayed beneath the page title in search engine result pages as a marketing message.
