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Building sites, we use several HTML tags, but usually there are three of them: title tag, meta description and meta keywords tags. But do you know what is the optimal length of these tags? Many reputable SEO guidelines figure the following length for tags:

60 max chars for title tag;
150 max chars for meta description;
800 max chars for meta keywords;

Why believe “reputable” sources, which general aim is to earn money selling copies to information-seeking webmasters? Let’s go places, where this information is for free and moreover, wherefrom this information comes. I mean that resources, which give such rules.

Let’s start with the W3C, which says that the title should be not longer than 64 chars. Thus you will prevent your title from getting broken or incorrectly displayed in the majority of viewing applications that have limited lines length for title tag. You can read it here: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/TITLE.html

In case if your target is Google, keep your title tag not longer than 68 chars – the rest of your title will be lost, when your site will get displayed in SERPs. See the following phrase, which is longer than 68 chars:
This is a good phrase about title tag and how it will appear in Google

This is how such phrase will appear in serps:

This is a good phrase about title tag and how it will appear in… (Last word is cut due to 66 chars limit).

Using more than 66 chars can be only useful if you’d like to intrigue your visitors. For instance such title will look attractive even though it will appear broken in Google SERPs.

Cool freebies and discounts are available in our online shop till … (Looks attractive, huh?)

In other cases, you’d prefer to keep your title tag under 66 chars to inform potential visitor about your site’s content correctly and attractively.

Unlike Google, Yahoo! allows titles up to 120 chars long, but it will crop your title right at 120th tag regardless whether it was the end of word or not, thus the end of your title in Yahoo SERPs can look as follows: “the end of a cool phra…” instead of “the end of a cool phrase…” or, as Google cuts it “the end of a cool …”.

Thus targeting your title for both engines consider making it significant for both cropping cases. For instance take a look at this phrase:

Cool description of a title tag and how it will appear in Google and Yahoo search engines.

In Google it will look as follows

Cool description of a title tag and how it will appear in Google…

And in Yahoo it will be full, because total length of this phrase is 91 chars of 120 allowed by Yahoo:

Cool description of a title tag and how it will appear in Google and Yahoo search engines.

Due to meta keywords and meta description tags – they can be of any length you’d like to, but remember that they have become probably useless for SEO. But we still need meta description: site description is used when listing it in directories, thus keep your meta description precise and cute and not longer than 120 chars (usual description length in directories).

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Filed under: HTML and Page Coding

It is a great mistake to leave your site not checked after you launch it. Lots of webmasters make sites, host them and wait till mistakes will appear. This is a completely negative approach to webmastering, because since a search spider has come and failed to access some separate pages, or directories of your site, or whether it was confused with some misworking script, it will be very hard to force search engine to index your site properly once more.

I’m writing this, because recently I had such problem with one of my sites. It was checked, but I’ve missed a broken line in one of pages and it took long time and hard work to force it to get re-indexed properly.

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Filed under: HTML and Page Coding

This is a problem that many webmasters are ought to deal with sooner or later. Especially those, who have old sites, which were all based on .html files. Of course one can just change all .html extensions to .php and replace the same characters in pages’ code. However, if you deal with SEO and your old good site occupies good position in SERPs, such changes can be fatal for your project for the following reasons:

1. All indexed .html files must be indexed again with .php extensions.
2. All links pointing particular page will be lost, unless you report all of your link partners and site owners, who link to you (re-indexing of new links will take some time too).
3. You will lose a lot of traffic from search engines during re-indexing of the whole site will occur, even if you put an error page that will redirect surfers somewhere to your .php pages.
4. Nobody knows whether your site will return back to good positions in SERPs after it will drop out.

So, what to do if you don’t want to change file extensions for the purpose of SEO, but need to include some php code in your pages anyway? There are several methods.

The first, and the most obvious is to use mod_rewrite (in case if your server supports mod_rewrite and you have permissions to modify .htaccess file). If yes - put the following strings in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html $1\.php

Now all requested .html pages will be automatically substituted with .php pages.

Another method works with .htaccess again. Add the following string to .htaccess file:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm

I think that this method is the most convenient one, because it simply allows executing PHP scripts to run in .html files. If you have no access to your .htaccess file, contact your hoster and request to make appropriate modification of httpd.conf for your site.

If you were using SSI on your site, for instance like this:

Than you can replace it with the following string in your .php files:

< ? include('file.txt'); ?>

You can also ask your hoster to add the following to httpd.conf file. In this case you can avoid using mod_rewrite:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml .htm .html

//Max

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Filed under: HTML and Page Coding

There is much controversy around title separators. Some webmasters pay no attention to kind and functional side of title separators, some think that using right title separators is a very important step in page’s optimization. Such controversy forced me to make a research on my pages and with help of other webmasters. Here are the results.

It has been proved that various title separators actually make same sense. Well, not all of them, but the majority of title separators used by webmasters. However, I’ve seen even “<” and “[“ separators in titles of some pages – these variants are really bad, because of their HTML significance. Others – spaces, commas, hyphens, pipe tags, etc. are good – so what to choose.

The second part of research was a mass opinion check. According to the poll surfers better understand pipe tags as separators than hyphens. Hyphen reminds dash and dash is more like to be a continue of phrase, than it’s separation – thus pipe tag is better from surfers’ point of view. However, Google guides are always saying that they are looking for pages with correct English grammar – thus for pages containing correctly expressed thoughts and complete phrases and messages. Considering correct grammar, we must consider commas and hyphens instead of pipe tags.

Summary. Concluding all mentioned above, I can say that we have distinguished 3 separators that fit both search engines and surfers. It’s up to you what to choose – convenience for surfers or search engines. Both are important, so your goal is to vary these distinguished tags to please both sides.

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Filed under: HTML and Page Coding

We all know how doubtful and unpredictable the majority of optimization methods are. You find and learn something, you make sites and they seem to be positioned on top pages, but everything ruins all of a sudden, Google adds new filters, new page appraisal methods and you can just take a deep breath and start over again. Sometimes you trap into blind alley and doubt what to do. It’s time to relax and spend a little more time getting back to the basics, which stand beyond all search engine optimization methods – Indexing.

Sometimes, when we optimize and overoptimize our sites, we forget that a page, which you’d like to be well positioned in any search engine must be indexable primarily! These are just the few of reasons why your page can be slowly or completely not indexed by spiders.

1. Check your robots.txt file – does it allows all spiders to see contents of your site?
2. Check your webserver options – it can block a document or a directory.
3. After finishing a site always check it for correct functioning of all installed scripts and plugins. Use special software that checks site for broken links.
4. Check your site for blind pages. These are pages to which you can click through, but wherefrom there is no links neither to other pages, nor to the main page of your site. Blind pages are not just difficult indexing, but badly influence on PR distribution over all over your site. Page Rank is like water – it needs a channel to flow in and a channel to flow out – otherwise it will uselessly stay at your blind page making no further profit for site in general.
5. Check automatic redirects. They are generally unwanted on a well-optimized sites, but anyway, if there are redirects – check them for correct functioning and check whether all browsers correctly understand your redirection codes.
6. It is recommended to avoid JavaScript and drop-down navigations. They are good only in case if they duplicate plain HTML navigation.
7. Check pages’ Meta tags – are they allow robots to index the page and all it’s contents.
8. Avoid duplicate content, invisible text and links on your site. This can easily cause ban.
9. Try not to use old domains re-buying them from other webmasters. Anyway – if you buy a new domain – check it’s history.

Summary. Building a site you should always keep indexing as priority over all optimization tricks – if your page won’t be properly indexed – your site will probably get worst rankings, regardless all tricks you use.

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Filed under: HTML and Page Coding