A well thought out title tag is a simple, but incredibly important part of search engine optimization. A good title tag will help you in your quest for better rankings.
Many site owners still tend to use text along these lines in their title tag: “Welcome to SiteName.com”
This is a little bit of a waste of primo page real estate, particularly if your company name is not relevant to the products or services you sell. Major search engines consider the text contained within a title tag as an important part of relevancy and therefore ranking.
I experienced this first hand on my own site many years ago as “Taming the Beast.net”, the name of my business, really did not reflect what my site was about. By simply changing the title tag text, I saw an improvement in ranking for the home page very quickly.
What is a title tag?
The TITLE tag isn’t displayed on your page, but is shown in the browser title bar when the page is viewed. The title tag can be found by viewing the html source of your page. It is located before the <body> tag, between the <head> and </head> tags e.g.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title Tag Text</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<p>content of the page</p>
</BODY>
</HTML>
In Microsoft FrontPage, editing title tags is simple. Right mouse button click over the page while in “Normal” mode and select “Page properties’, then complete the field that states “Title”. Click OK and that’s it. In other editors, usually there will be a feature similar to this; check your editor’s help file for instructions.
How long should a title tag be?
In my opinion, The title tag should be kept between 60 – 90 characters in length; but recommended lengths will vary depending upon the person’s own experience. To me, a good guide is the way Google displays search results. You’ll notice that Google only displays approximately 65 characters of the title in listings, although some engines display more.
Relevancy and keywords
Even if you choose to use more characters than I recommend, you should always have the most important keywords towards the beginning of the tag. Keywords are important and popular terms related to the content of your page
Here’s an example:
<TITLE>Web marketing – articles, tools, news and reviews</TITLE>
Important note – always remember to close your tags e.g. </TAG>
Things to avoid
Another very important tip – always use different title tags for each page of your site and only use the same word no more than twice in a single title tag; preferably with a decent gap between. This is to prevent search engines from a) mistakenly “thinking” all your pages are the same or similar in the case of the former and b) for the latter, avoiding penalties for overusage of a single word; a practice known as keyword stuffing.
One final big “don’t” is not to attempt to fool the search engines by implementing irrelevant titles. For instance, if your page is about car steering wheel covers, don’t use tags that indicate it’s about car insurance. This type of activity can see your page ranking penalized ; particularly if it’s obvious that it’s a conscious implementation.
Back your title tag up with good content
A good title tag without solid page content will be of little benefit; so try to ensure that your visible page content is unique, keyword rich (without going over the top) and unique. Along with a few inbound links from other sites and a dash of luck, you’ll soon see the benefits of taking care when implementing your title tags!
