Many common practices to rank well in the past now actually hurt your ranking. In general,any change you make to your site with the intention of making it appeal more to search engines, while having the effect of making it appeal less to a human user, is going to impose apenalty.

Such practices include placing many general search terms in the title of a page which may not have anything at all to do with what that particular page is about. This not only confuses users, but also leads to demerit points from search engines that note that you’re lying about the actual content of that page. As mentioned earlier, your top level heading should match your page title, so if you’re adding keywords to the title that you wouldn’t put in a large heading on the page, they probably shouldn’t be there.

Another current common practice is to include the site’s name in the page’s title, such as About e-government – New Zealand E-government Programme, which is usually acceptable as it helps users see what site they’re on. The search engines will tolerate this, and it may even help your rankings if users search for a combination of your site’s name as well as keywords from page content.

Always ensure that your title and meta tags correctly describe the content of the page they are on. Adding superfluous keywords to either will result in lower rankings and the possibility of being blacklisted for those terms.

For more information: e.govt.nz/resources/research/SEO.pdf