The Title tag is probably one of the most important element in your search engine optimization plan, if not The most important for most of the search engine…and of course especially for Google.
The title tag defines the title of a web page. It’s what you see on top of your browser window.
Here’s an example of the title, for one of my page:
In the HTML code, the title is between the meta tag <title> (beginning of the tag) and </title> (end of the tag).
Example for the same page:
<title>web designer Seattle, graphic designer Seattle, website design, logo design, advertisement design | Christophe Peyras, Creative Director Seattle</title>
N.B.
If you’re using any kind of html editor, it might put the title anywhere but make sure that your title tag is the higher possible in your page:
<html>
<head>
<title>web designer Seattle, graphic designer Seattle, website design, logo design, advertisement design | Christophe Peyras, Creative Director Seattle</title>
What to put in the title?
The best choice for your page title is a set of keywords that represent what you are and what you’re doing. Try to avoid titles like “Welcome” or “Homepage”….or even worse “Welcome to my homepage!”. Instead, it should contains your company name or simply your name, and it should describes what you’re doing.
Don’t put too much though. Not more than 10 keywords in the title. Between 5 and 10 seems to be a good average.
N.B.
Nothing actually proves that the position of one keyword in the title will have more value than the other. If the important keywords are on the title it’s already a good optimization…but knowing Google while I’m writing that, it might change so stay updated;)
Also, don’t even think about havng the same keyword repeated 10 times, it’s not gonna help you more. But you can have 2 or more keywords in the same title, like that for example:
<title>Search engine optimization, Google optimization, websire optimization: My Compnay, Seattle</title>
In search engine results, here’s where you’re gonna see your page title:
As you can see, the title is the the first thing seen by your potential visitor when he looks at the result pages. On a Google search results, users will have the choice between 10 pages per page, they probably will go for the title that seems to represent the most what they’re looking for. So don’t just put keywords one after the other, but try to imagine that you are searching for something on the web, what would you go for?
It must be a good compromise between search engine friendly and user friendly…but user always comes first!
Also, the title will be used as bookmark title. If someone wants to put your website in his bookmarks, then the title wlll also be the bookmark title. Just think about it, having a title that reminds easily what’s the website is for.
So what’s the best title? Try to use the same structure like:
<TITLE>[your name] : [keywords related to the page content]</TITLE>
or
<TITLE>[keywords related to the page content] : [your name]</TITLE>
One page, one title!
All the pages of your websites need to have a different title. If you have sections and sub-sections, don’t hesitate to be more and more precise in your title. This is quiet obvious: the deeper you navigate, the more precise the information needs to be. If there’s one thing that you need to spend some time on is the title of your page, this is very important! If you do it right, you’re almost half way on your search engine optimization.
So in a perfect world, your title will be made of 10 words maximum or 10 expressions, will summarize the content of your page, will have the most important keywords related to the content of your page
