The HTML tag – Title – is so important for search engine optimization that we feel it merits its own blog post. According to search engine experts, using keywords in a well-crafted Title tag is one of the most important factors for both:

1. Getting a site to rank accurately and prominently in search engine results, and
2. Getting the user to choose your website from the search engine results page.

What Are Page Titles?
The Page Title is the content within the Title tag on an HTML page. Each page of a website has its own Title tag.

You can see what a page’s title is by looking at the (blue in Windows) bar in the browser window. In the browser Internet Explorer, for example, the title will be Page Title – Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Another way to see the title is to select View -> Source from the menu. Towards the top of the page you will see the HTML title tags surrounding the actual title:

<title>A Web Marketing Blog & SEO, Email Marketing,… Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings</title>

Here is how the webpage associated with this Title tag appears on Google’s search results page:

Because Google accounts for the majority of total Internet search traffic, we think that tailoring Title tags to Google is very important.
(The search term we used was “web marketing blog”.)

How to Write Page Titles
Each page should have a unique Title tag that describes its content, similar to the title of a newspaper article, i.e., something that makes the user want to click on your site’s link. Good webpage titles incorporate the following factors:

Accurately Describe the Page’s Content
Write a title for each page on your site that accurately describes the content of that particular page. The search engines may discount a page whose title does not reflect the content on the page. Also, making a Title that is pleasant and informative for human readers will increase the likelihood that human readers will choose your site.

Writing an individual Title for each page of a site is labor intensive so many sites do not do this, which means that sites that contain accurate titles for each individual page have a key advantage.

Use Keywords
Whenever practical, use keywords. Keyword research indicates which keywords are more important for a site. However, it is more important that the Title should accurately describe the page’s contents – with or without keywords.

Place Important Words Early in the Title
Search engines and people seem to believe that links that most directly reflect what they’ve searched for are the most relevant. So it makes sense to put what search engines and people are looking for first – this makes finding easier for them. Both are trying to find specific information.

The tendency is to always have a company name, followed by the real page title. This is usually counterproductive, since the user is probably not looking for a company name. For example, think about newspaper articles. They do not typically contain the name of the publication, as in

New York Times: Wayward Humpback Pair Moves Toward Ocean

In our first example, the website actually is a web marketing blog, and that’s what the website owner puts first in the Title, and the title of the site, “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings”, appears at the end of the Title.

Formatting the Title Tag
It’s a good idea to capitalize most of the words in the title to give it more urgency.

Also, remember that Google only displays the first 66 characters of the Title tag.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 9:46 am and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.