Best Use Of title Tag

While many people have differing opinions as to the benefits of the description and Keywords tag, most all are in agreement that the title tag is extremely important for any SEM campaign. The title tag is used by pretty much every search engine that uses spiders to crawl your website. That list includes Google, AOL, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, ExactSeek.com and more. The title tag is pretty much the most effective meta Tag and is used for conveying the theme of your Webpage to the search engines. Not only is the structure and content of the title tag used by the search engines when calculating your webpage’s relevance, but it is also displayed in most search engine results pages (SERP). It therefore needs to be carefully constructed in such a way that it influences your websites position in the SERP, but is also attractive enough to encourage a surfer to click on your link.

Long gone are the days when cramming dozens of words into a title tag would result in better search engine positioning. These days the search engines, Google in particular, prefer to see shorter title tags that are succinct in describing the content on the page. In fact, it appears that stuffing more words into your title tag will do more harm than good, especially when targeting very competitive search phrases.

So how should a good title tag look? That, my friend, is one of the many questions that us marketers strive to answer. Each of us have our own ideas of what constitutes a good title tag and the format for one page, might be totally inappropriate for another. However, I understand that to not provide an example would be a complete omission, so here goes:

<title>Desktop computers and computer supplies</title> or;
<title>Desktop computers and computer supplies at 123Computers</title>

As you can see, there are really only two identifiable phrases that make up the above title tag, but they provide for many different keyword combinations such as “desktop computer supplies” or “desktop computer”. Equally important is the fact that they focus on just one theme. Many times, I’ll see websites that will try and target two or more very competitive keywords that do not follow the same theme e.g. “desktop computers and digital cameras”.

You’ll also notice two different formats depending on whether you wish to include your company name or not. In an ideal world of search engine marketing, webpages would not include the company name at all. Unless you’re Dell or IBM, the name of your company really doesn’t make much difference to the user at this stage. They are more interested in knowing the theme of your page and whether it is relevant to the search query they entered. Likewise, the title tag is a valuable thing and adding the name of your company might reduce the relevancy of your page in the eyes of the search engines and reduce valuable space that could be used by an extra keyword. That being said, more than 80% of website owners prefer to see their company name listed somewhere in the title tag. If that is the case for you, it is my advice to place the company name at the end of the title tag, allowing the search engine spiders and surfers to read the keywords first and determine the relevance to the search query before seeing the name of the company.

In most cases, less is definitely more when constructing optimized title tags for your website. Keeping to fewer keywords will help to demonstrate to the search engines and their users that the webpage is both highly relevant and solely focused on a particular product or service. In the same way, ensuring that each page has its own unique title tag will ensure a greater chance your site will be positioned higher on the SERP.

In finishing, I’ll leave you with three things you should never do when constructing your title tag.

Leave “Untitled” as your title tag (don’t get me started).
Use “Homepage” as your title tag (only slightly better than “untitled”).
Use only your company name as your title tag. Unless your company name is searched thousands of times each month, add keywords.
The above advice should keep you busy for the next few days. The next topic in the series will cover the ideas and formats to use for your description tag. We’ll go through, step-by-step the purpose of the description tag which search engines use it, as well as techniques for getting better positioning.