5 Easy Steps to Top Title Tags
Monday, 15 February 2010 17:11 | 
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The Title Tag is a major factor in search engine optimization. Using it and using it correctly can make a major difference in your search engine results. This article will outline:
- What is the Title Tag?
- Where is the Title Tag?
- What Text Should I use in the Title Tag?
- How do I Insert the HTML Code for the Title Tag?
- How do I Utilize the Title Tag for Optimum Success?
1. What is the Title Tag?
The title tag displays the name of the website page that both the search engine bots and we human surfers can see. The title tag should be different for each page of your site. It is reportedly the single most important factor that the search engine bots will index. When your website is displayed on the search engine results page (i.e. SERP), you’ll notice that the title tag IS the link text. The success or failure of your click-through rate (i.e. how often a surfer finds and clicks the SERP link) will be very dependent on the text in your title tag.
2. Where is the Title Tag?
You can see your title tag displayed at the very top of your browser window, in the normally blue bar.
In the case of my own website, the title tag says “Cluster Web Design – Steinbach Web Design – Fresh, Clean, Right!” followed by “- Mozilla Firefox.” If you were using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, it would end with exactly that instead of Mozilla Firefox. [For those who didn’t know this, now, while you surf the Internet, take notice of how many sites you visit that don’t use their title tag at all and therefore have “Untitled – Mozilla Firefox” as their title tag. How many “Untitled” results do you see in the search engines? I can’t ever remember seeing even one come up. What does that imply?]
3. What Text Should I use in the Title Tag?
Keyword and/or phrase research is beyond the scope of this article, but, they are a key component to your title tag. Until you’ve done the research, you’ll have to just make an educated guess. Remember that the search engines index web PAGES; not web SITES so your title tag should be different on each page in order for each page to get uniquely indexed. The title tag on each particular page should contain keywords or phrases that pertain to that individual page on your website. For instance, if your website is a business website about your chartered accountant company, your title tag might be something like this:
Toronto Accountants – CAs in Toronto, Ontario – Partner and Partner, Inc.
Or
Partner and Partner, Inc. – Toronto Accountants – CAs in Toronto, Ontario
I prefer to place the company name at the end leaving the keywords and/or keyword phrases right up front.
NOTE ON KEYWORDS/PHRASES: Use them early; use them often.
Just be sure to keep it readable for humans.
There are two important points to be made with regard to the length of your title tag.
Most importantly, Google will only index the first 10 words. Second, in order for the entire title tag to show in the SERP link title, your title tag should be limited to 65 characters -- including spaces. However, if your title tag is longer than that and the SERP cuts it off, it is still read in the indexing of the title tag.
4. How do I Insert the HTML Code for the Title Tag:
How you insert the code or work with your title tags depends greatly on what program or content management system you have chosen to use to create and maintain your website. If you are using or can access your raw HTML code, your title tag will go somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags as follows:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Keyword | Keyword Phrase | Company Name, Inc. </title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
If you are using a content management system such as Joomla 1.5, then you establish your title tag at the point of creating/modifying a menu item, like this:
Whatever system you use, do some research on how to manipulate the title tag entry in order to learn how to do it.
5. How do I Utilize the Title Tag for Optimum Success?
Be consistent. That is, once you’ve established a good method (i.e. keyword | keyword phrase | company name or company name | keyword | keyword phrase), stick to it for each and every page of your site. That is, use a consistent format—not the same textual information. Remember that each page is different on your website, right? Label them accordingly.
Your title tag text for any given page will also closely resemble your heading tag for that page. (We’ll cover this in another article).
The title tag is not carved in stone. If you find that when you test your keywords/phrases by searching them in any search engine and you are not happy with your results, you can modify your title tags for (hopefully) better results. However, you don’t want to be doing this too quickly. Give the current title tags about a month or between changes. Based solely on personal experience, I find that Google will re-index any given page on a site about every 15 to 20 days; however, each site is rated differently by Google and may be re-indexed on a very different schedule than what I have experienced.
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Last Updated (Thursday, 25 March 2010 15:41)
