Monday, February 18, 2008

The Title Tag

In order to make your site easier for visitors to find and more search engine friendly, we have tutorials and pages on this website that cover Search Engine Optimization, Building links to your Site, PageRank and Link Popularity.

Here I'll talk about the proper use of the Title Tag, the Description Tag and Keywords which will also help make your site more search engine friendly and increase your search engine rankings.

Title Tag Usage

The "title" element of a Web page is used in several way:

It appears in the Browser window Title bar when you view a Web page
It is used as the initial Bookmark name when you set a bookmark for a Web page
It is also displayed with the description you see in the Search results of a search engine query.

The <title></title> element goes inside the <Head></Head> element tags of your HTML.

The most important one of the above items as it relates to search engines is that the Title Tag is used by the search engines in the search results you see. When you perform a search, with many of the search engines the very first line that you see (for the descriptions that are posted) is the title tag line.

Some search engines will show a title of length of up to 96 or even 100 characters. A Google search displays about 65 characters, so you'll want to keep the title length long enough to be descriptive, but short enough that the entire title will be displayed for a search.

Here's an example of how Google search results generally look:

Free Background Textures for Web Pages
Free background clipart, textures, gifs, backgrounds, animations, guestbooks,
homepages, Meta Tags, link exchange and much more...
www.backgroundsandmore.com/ - 26k - Cached - Similar pages

The words "Free Background Textures for Web Pages" is the title of that particular Web page. In the HTML code, the title would look like this:
<title>Free Background Textures for Web Pages</title>

The "Free background clipart, textures,..." information is the "description" of the Web page, which I will discuss in the section on Keywords and Description Tags topic.

Recommendations on Title Information

You want your title to Catch People's Attention when they perform a search and see the results, so use words (keywords) that tell what your page is about, like "Handmade Quilts" or "Stock Investment Counselor" or "Rare Coin Sales". But first of all, you need to know what are the keywords that search engine users are typing into search queries in order to find your product. I'll talk more about this in the topic on Building Keyword Lists.

Some Web developers make the mistake of using the same title information for all of their pages, and usually it's the company name. This isn't using the title to the best of it's potential unless your company name happens to be a household word like Sears or Cannon or Wal-Mart, where people will automatically know what your business is about.

Company names are best placed in logos, footers and the "About Us" page of a Website.

Studies have shown that on the average, 75% or more of web searchers will be looking in search queries not for your company name, but for what your business is about.

If you want top search engine rankings, then you need to include your keywords in the title tag to help you get those rankings.

Search engines look for keywords in the title, so use the number one keyword for that page in the title. I'll talk more about keywords in the section on Keywords and Description Tags.

In addition to the Title Tag, there are other Tags called Meta Tags. In the next Tutorial section on Meta Tags, I'll talk about what they are and how you should use them on your Web pages.