Title Tag Optimization

The single most important optimization trick is also one of the easiest to accomplish.

The title might be the single most important on-page SEO element, because it tells search engines what to find on that page, and search engines use that title in the search engine results page. So if you have your company name in the title of your page and it does not accurately describe what that page is about (example: your product) then the search engine will not rank that page well for your product. In addition, if you do rank for that page, the search engine user (searcher) will see just your company name and say, “What does this have to do with my search?” and skip over to a more relevant listing.

Barry Schwartz — www.rustybrick.com

How many times have you looked at a web site where the page Title in your browser reads “Welcome to [company name]’s web site” or simply “[Company Name]”? Nothing wrong with that, I hear you say? Well if you want to achieve high search engine rankings, there’s PLENTY wrong with it. You see, while it may not be common knowledge amongst webmasters or (shock, horror!) even some web designers, most search engines index the content of the Title Attribute and consider it to be one of THE most important factors in their relevancy algorithm.

What you place in your Title can make or break your ranking for particular search terms on the various engines. If you don’t include your most important search phrases within your Title tag (and target the content of each Title to the content on each page), you are overlooking a vital opportunity in your quest for higher search rankings.

Kalena Jordan — www.high-search-engine-ranking.com

As for what is known as “on-page” optimization, which involves the source code on your website, probably the most important thing to get right is the Title tag. This has to be the most weighted tag on a webpage, and if your keywords do not show up in it, then you can expect poor rankings.

Alan Webb — www.abakus-internet-marketing.de

Last Words

The two most important aspects when optimizing a site for Google or any other crawler-based search engine are the title tag and content of each page. One should make sure that the keywords that are relevant to each page are represented in the title tag of the page as opposed to saying something like “Welcome to our site!”. One must also make sure they have well-written HTML text that also represents the keywords they wish to target. With Google, more often than not, content is king.

You should try and keep your Title to a maximum of 200 characters, as that is the average limit most search engines will truncate to. If you really insist on including your company name in your title and you’re willing to sacrifice good keyword real estate to do so, put it at the very end of the tag, because search engines give more relevancy “weight” to content at the start of your tag.