The importance of a good title tag
By: Jakob Jelling | Posted: 12th January 2005
By Jakob Jelling
http://www.sitetube.com
When you are optimizing your website for search engine placement and trying to get a higher search engine ranking, you usually use several different optimization techniques and modify several parts of your web pages. In this article I would like to concentrate on the importance of a good title and, therefore, a good title tag for your optimization objectives.
The title tag is probably one of the most important tags for your web pages. It is checked by the search engines' spider programs and is one of the characteristics used to determine the ranking for your website. The title tag includes the title text that you created for each specific web page, the title that provides information about the contents of your web page.
There are several techniques that you can use to optimize your title for search engines. First of all, you need to make sure that your title does not exceed 70 - 80 characters. You should probably shoot for seven to eight words in the title. This is also important for your visitors as they need to be able to see the whole title at the top of the webpage browser window. Keep in mind that you should try to use different title text for different web pages that you have.
After you selected the keywords and key phrases for your web page, you need to choose the most important keyword or key phrase and place it in the title. Do not repeat the keyword more then once since your title has to be meaningful to the visitors. Also try to have the keyword or key phrase closer to the beginning of your title.
You should also make sure that your title is interesting to the visitors. If it is not interesting, no matter what is your ranking, your visitors will probably skip through your web page. So try to make the title as eye-catching to the visitors as possible. Remember that visitors will see several other titles when they will do the search, so you need to make sure that they would want to click on your title to go to your website.
The best thing to do is to write several different titles, take a close look at all of them, and then select the title that you think the search engine visitors will like the best. You can also have someone else to look at your titles and select the best one.
About the Author
About the author Jakob Jelling is the founder of
http://www.sitetube.com Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.
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Tags: title tag, phrases, phrase, web pages, web page, search engine placement, optimization techniques, optimizing your website