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Title tag optimization guidelines
Most of us on our home page tend to place "Welcome to
www.fdfdf544545fdda.com" as the TITLE tag text.
This is not a good practice, especially if your site name is not
relevant to your subject area. Many search engines use the title
tag as an important part of relevancy and therefore ranking.
For example, my home page title was originally "Taming the Beast
Online". It didn't describe my site at all. All my most important
keywords should have been in there. I would have been much better
off with a tag that read "Free Web Design Resources, online
courses and tutorials at Taming the Beast".
I made the change, and at that time, suddenly shot from obscurity
to No.3 on a major search engine on a competitive term during the
next database refresh. We don't hold that ranking any more as we
constantly change our tag to give us exposure to a wider audience
(and to experiment), and our direction has changed, but our
strategy remains the same.
The TITLE tag should be kept between 60 - 90 characters in length.
I've read many conflicting reports on TITLE length, but a good
practical guide is Google. On search results, Google currently
displays only approximately 60 characters of the title - some
engines display more. Keeping this in mind, keep the most
important keywords at the beginning of your title.
Here's an example:
<TITLE>Tibetan Spider Farming resources - free arachnid tutorials
and tools</TITLE>
NOTE - always remember to close your tags e.g. </TAG>
In FrontPage 2000 editing TITLE tags is simple. Right mouse button
click on a clear area of a page while in edit mode and select
"Page properties'. Simply complete the field that states "Title".
Click OK and you're done.
When you carry out a search via one of the major search engines,
it is not uncommon for the results to show a good deal of
"garbage" headings. This is because the site owners do not have a
correct title tag (in some cases, none at all)... There has been
something else in the content that has attracted the search engine
spiders attention.
The TITLE coding can be found by viewing the html of your
page...it is always located before the <body> tag
Remember to use different, but suitable title tag text on each
page of your site. Most search engines don't just look at your
index page. They'll follow links ('spider') the entire site. This
will help increase your listings chances. Even if a user does not
initially access your home page from these search engine results,
they can quite easily navigate to your top page - as long as you
have the appropriate links of course! Think of your site as a
house with as many doors as it has pages.
The way that visitors find their way to your site via search
engines can be on the strangest criteria. We've been noticing a
number of hits on the term "enema" (not that we really want that
traffic!). This has happened as a result of one of my articles
being entitled "Site Upgrades - A digital enema"!
It isn't wise to try and fool the search engines either by
consciously implementing irrelevant titles, it will soon be
detected and your page ranking will drop, or worse still, your
site may be removed from the index.
Gaining higher search engine rankings with just a good title tag
won't cut it either, there is a lot more to search engine
optimization than that. You can read further articles on our site
that will assist you in this area. Search engines are constantly
changing the algorithms in calculating page rankings, so what
works today may not work tomorrow...
... but there's nothing like a good challenge ;0)
Related articles:
The importance of anchor text
Identifying Search Engine Spiders
Introduction to Meta-Tags
Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content, tools and software.
Web Marketing, Internet Development & Ecommerce Resources
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