The title tag is one of the most important factors in search engine optimization. In fact, sometimes changing the title tags alone can produce big improvements in your search engine rankings.
So, what is the TITLE tag?
The TITLE tag is a line of code in each one of your web pages that looks something like this:
<title>Blue Dogs :Â Springfield Dog Service</title>
You can see what your title tag’s contents are by looking at the top of your browser or in the heading of a tab.
Why is the TITLE tag important?
When it comes to search engines, the title tag is very important. It tells them what the page is about. In fact, it is one of the top three things you should pay attention to when optimizing your website for search engines.
Wording and Constructing Title Tags
The way your title tag is worded and constructed is very important. We’ve found that your title tag should be between 10 and 12 words, and should contain your most important key phrases for that page. Remember, search engines index pages, not sites as a whole. So you should pay attention to each page’s title tag.
Your title tag should also follow a theme throughout your site. Typically we recommend using your company name in the title as well. Let’s say your company name is “ACME Marbles” and you are focusing on a page about large blue marbles. Your title tag should look something like this:
<title>Large Blue Marbles : ACME Marbles</title>
If you are only targeting customers in a certain state or town then your title tag should contain those words as well. For example…
<title>Large Blue Marbles : ACME Marbles : Hartford, CT</title>
or, since we have more room to work with here…
<title>Large Blue Marbles, Big Blue Marbles, Best Marbles : ACME Marbles : Hartford, CT</title>
We recommend using colons or hyphens to seperate your key phrases. Avoid using stop words like of, and, or by. These words will dilute the importance of the key phrases that you really want to focus on.
Connect TITLE to the content on the page
Make sure that the words that are in your title tage also appear often throughout your page. If your title is going to contain “Blue Marbles” you are telling the search engines that this page is about Blue Marbles. If they don’t find the term Blue Marbles on the page, or they don’t find it often, then you won’t rank highly because the title doesn’t match the actual page content.
We hope these tips help you write good TITLE tags for your site. Go check them and see if your current title tags are written well and match your page content.