The Title of Web Page Deserves Your Careful Attention

The page title is entered into the meta tag of the code for your page.  It deserves your full and thoughtful attention.  Whether you have a new mini-site or a gradually developed, mature, professionally created website, you must determine each page’s title carefully determined for several very important reasons.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The title of a page is an essential piece of information that modern search engines use to identify the content of any page.  In the early days of the Internet, search engines put an immense amount of faith in the honesty of webmasters to use the keyword tags to accurately describe the topic or topics of any particular web page.  However, as the keyword meta tag became abused by cheating web authors who were trying to “game” the system, the importance of the title tag of a page grew.  Many businesses choose to spend money on this important topic by hiring keyword research consultants to help them choose page titles for their web pages.

Browser Top Information: The words used in the title tag show up in the uppermost region of the browser window.  Although some visitors do not even notice the word or words at that location, other visitors rely upon that as a short-hand reference to immediately determine the topic of that particular page.

Search Listings Headline: At the top of any individual listing in a search engine query is the page title, taken directly from the title tag.  That is what is hyperlinked to take anyone who clicks it to your page, which of course is your goal.  It is blue and underlined so that it is the most noticeable part of your coveted listing.

Text in the Browser Bookmark: If the user chooses to bookmark the page in his or her browser, the title is the default text that is used in the bookmark, itself.  Of course, the browser will allow the user to alter those words or, in some browsers, add tags for later reference, most visitors simply accept the default text of the webmaster assigned title.

What follows are some recommendations that I hope will serve as a summary of things to consider in choosing the titles of your various website pages. 

1. Use your primary keyword as the whole title of a page or within the title of a page.  If necessary, you can include two or three keywords or phrases within the title, however you should rank order those, putting the most important keywords first and separating each keyphrase with a space, punctuation such as a dash followed by another space.

2. Be certain the selected title stands out to everyone who has searched for your relevant keyword when your listing makes an appearance in the search engine’s results.

3. Make certain that the page title is brief by also a complete accurate description of the page.  Thus, it will be recognizable and useful to the user who sees it listed among the list of bookmarks in her or his browser.

4. Don’t use the word “home” as your complete title of your home page.  Unless the page is about the concept of home or a house, calling a page “home” provides no useful information to the search robots or to your site’s visitors knowledge of what your site or this page is really about.  However you can use the word as part of a larger title in a descriptive way, such as “Home to the World’s Cheapest Plumber.”

5. You should experiment with changing your title every once in a while to test if you achieve better search engine results, in the same way that you would run tests on all of the major variables on your website.