Ever since webmasters learnt how Title Tag can be effective in search engine optimization, it’s a hot topic of discussion.
A lot has been written about title tags, however I will limit my article to what is a title tag, what to write in a title tag and importance of a good title tag.
What is a Title Tag?
All webpages should have a title tag. A title tag is written like this:
<title>Text of the Title</title>
Usually its in the <head> section of the page.
<head>
<title>Text of the Title</title>
</head>
Where “Text of the Title” is the Title of the page.
Where does it appear?
The text in between the <title> and </title> tag appears at the top of the browser.
What to write in a Title Tag?
This is important. A title tag “represents” the page so it’s important what you write in the Title tag.
Think what the page is about (and NOT what the website is about).
If the site is about USA, but the page is about cost of living in New York, then the title should be
“Cost of living in New York”.
Important Notes:
Importance of Title Tag:
The Title Tag is very important from SEO point of view. Search for anything in your favorite search engine and you will see that most result pages will have the searched text in their Title Tags.
What does it mean? The search engines give a lot of importance to the Title Tag while ranking web pages.
Another importance of Title Tag is that they are displayed in the search engine results page (SERP) – the listing returned by the search engines in respond to a query.
Common sense says a searcher is more likely to click on the title they find interesting. Unfortunately badly written titles are not clicked even if they reach the top of the search engine results.
Title tags should be written after the content of the page is written. It’s a bad idea to write content based on Title. That way you are writing for the search engines. Write for your visitors first, and then write a compelling title that would impress the search engines and urge the searcher to click.
If you feel I have left something please leave a comment. Also do let me know what you would like to read in this blog.
Recommended Reading:
1. All About Title Tags
2. Title Tag Guidelines
3. Writing Title Tag For High Search Engine Ranking
Very well described. Sometimes You may like to make it dynamic. For example, running web-shop, its good idea to display also the product group and product name in the title — dynamically.
Other important to use same keywords in the title tag, description and heading.
Jack, http://seoapplied.blogspot.com/
Thanks Jack for the comment. I am not very sure but don’t you think there is some amount of risk involved when we create Title Tag dynamically?
The same content except the title changing with the keyword searched. Though I admit I have seen a site with PR 6 doing exactly this – it was no.1 for some very popular keywords. For every keyword I searched for the SERPs were showing different Title and the pages too. Surprisingly this was the index page of the site.
Yes same keywords should be used in description and heading, but I did not mention because the topic of the post was Title Tag.
Nice little article mate, cheers.
Have subscribed to your feed.
Thanks Dan