Optimizing Title Tags

There are many people who are not optimizing their title tags and they are losing traffic every day. So if you decide to make use of this one change to your website then you will already be ahead of much of the competition.

The title tag, or the title meta tag to give it it's full name, is one of the meta tags that you can set on your web pages.

The html code looks like this (without the space either side of the word title - I had to do that to get it to appear here!)

< title >title text< /title >

The "title text" is the title you give your page. For this page it's optimizing title tags page.

The title you choose is important for two reasons

1. It's read by the search engines and they determine what your web page is about from the title.
2. It's the heading that is displayed when you when your site appears in the search results.

So it is an extremely important tag.

To make sure your web page is indexed for your keywords, you should make sure your title tag includes your keywords. I'm assuming you know what are keywords. To make sure it appeals to potential visitors when it appears in the search results you need to think of a title that will catch the eye and compel your visitor to click on your link.

In terms of the length of the title it should really be no more than 100 characters including spaces. Google displays up to 66 characters, Yahoo much more.

As I've already, your keyword needs to be part of the title. It's ideal if you can include it at the start of the title

For example, on a web page aimed at offering web optimising advice to small businesses and the keyword for the page is "web optimising" I might use the following Title:

Alternatively if my keyword for the page is "small businesses" I might switch the title to be: