SEO Elements-Title Tags

The World Wide Web Consortium describes the Title Tag as a required element in an HTML document. Title Tags are a very significant guide for all search engines in determining what is in the content of a specific web page.


SEO Title Tags

Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino via Creative Commons

Creating a relevant Title Tag is one of the most important variables in achieving high search engine positioning. Therefore, the Title Tag is one of the most important factors used in the search engine optimisation process.
In HTML code, the Title Tag specifies the title of your Web page. It is code which is inserted into the header of your web page and looks like this:
{head}
{title} Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimisation {/title}
{/head}
The Title Tag should be used to express the SEO goals for that page. Great care must be exercised in choosing the keywords that will be used for the tag. You can’t put in every keyword that you’d like to optimise for, so it’s recommended that you choose the select few that will give you the biggest bang for your buck and are most relevant to the page. The Title Tag must reflect the content of the page, a Title Tag that contains words not included in the page is likely to be unused by search engines. Our SEO best practice guidelines recommend that a typical site use a page title of between 6 and 12 words. Every page must have unique and relevant Title Tags, this means no duplicating across lower levels in the site.

Common Title Tag mistakes include:

  • Do not leave your Title Tag empty, ever!
  • Do not use ‘Untitled’ or default text in your Title Tag.

If you are using a web page creation application it may place some default text in the title tag. E.g “Just another WordPress weblog”. Make sure you always check your title to make sure this doesn’t happen.

  • Do not write Title Tags that are not relevant to the content on the page.

Search engines compare text in the Title Tag against actual textual content on your page to rate relevancy. If the two are not related this will decrease your ranking. Furthermore, it is annoying to a person who visits your page when the Title Tag they saw going into your page does not relate to the content on the page. Finally do not try to stuff your Title Tag with repeating keyword phrases, remember the rule of one keyword phrase per page.
Title Tags of the HTML page appear in the search results for search engines, making it even more important. If you can make your title more attractive than the web sites, which are above your site in the search results, visitor may click on your site simply due to the effectiveness of the Title Tag. It is important to optimise the Title Tag for the keywords most likely to drive searches, that way you have a good chance of achieving a high click through rate for your site.
Using powerful words in your Title Tag will draw the user into your site. You may sometimes try to use the power of questions when creating Title Tags. When you ask a question, you force the reader to stop and mentally answer that question, which encourages the visitor to click on your web site and visit it. Not only is it one of your strongest chances to impact rankings, it is undoubtedly your best chance to convert a searcher to a visitor within the SERPs.
In summary, if you have only limited time and resources to dedicate to search engine optimisation and you wish to concentrate on on-page seo, then a substantial amount of your time and effort should go towards creating unique, attention grabbing and effective Title Tags for each page you wish to rank highly for.

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0 Replies to “SEO Elements-Title Tags”

Excellent site, keep up the good work

Hey Bob,
Getting the foundations of any SEO strategy correct is vital and Title tags are an important part of any SEO strategy so getting the basics right with regard to Title tags is crucial and that was the purpose of the post, please visit the link in my previous reply for some more in-depth information regarding title tags.
Marc

Hi Jim
Thanks for the positive comment, the article was aimed at more novice SEO’s, for detailed information have a look at this Bruce Clay Resource
http://www.bruceclay.com.au/newsletter/volume43/titletags.html
Marc

NIce article. Really nice! But i think that you could give some more info on a couple of points. However, keep on developing your nice site :)

I think you are right in your assumption.

bob

tell us something we dont know bruce

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