The Importance of Title Tags
Title tags are the first thing to consider on a web page. This is what will get the customer to the page and get you that sale. The title tags are going to appear on the search engine as part of the URL and meta description. The title tags are what search engines concentrate on regarding the page rankings. In fact it is one of the most influential aspects of the entire page ranking system. Therefore, there are three things to consider when creating the title tags.
The closer the keywords are to the start of the title tag the better. This is called prominence of keywords. In other words you need the keywords to start off the title for the most success.
Proximity regarding the keywords is also something to consider. The keywords should be grouped together, but they also need to make sense. So for this section the keywords should be displayed in the order of relevance for a search. What keyword will they search for first?
The density of keywords will increase the page ranking via the title tags. You can repeat keywords on the page, but you don’t want to repeat them in the title tags. This could actually lower the ranking. The reason for this is that it looks like spam to the crawler. So no more than one repetition and none at all if you can help it.
We mentioned before that the title tag is going to appear in the search results. The title tag is your first line of advertisement to get the person to your page. It is the sales pitch if you will. Therefore, the title tag has to enhance the consumers need. You also want to make sure that the title tag is displayed on the first page of results. This means there is a fine balance between the search engines needs and the visitor’s needs on the page. You want to have a balance that makes sense. A good SEO will make sure that the title tag is everything it can be with experimentation regarding the tag. You don’t want a keyword rich title tag. In other words it needs to make sense. You can’t have ten keywords in the title tag. It would be like a shopping list. So balance it out.
The sales pitch may rank lower. This is okay as long as you are still on that first page of results. The visitor is looking for solid information. This isn’t always found in the search engine results. The top ranking may be more geared towards the ranking of the page rather than the consumer. Don’t make this mistake. The better the sales pitch the chances are the better the sales are going to be.
Here are a couple of other things to remember about the title tags for a quick guide:
1) Each page on the website should have a unique title.
2) The page on the site needs to be a potential entrance. In other words they should be able to find each page in the search results to link them to the home page as well as having the home page come up.
3) Your target should be 1 to 2 primary keyword phrases. You also need 2 to 3 secondary keywords for the title.
4) Bear in mind that the keywords should be in the title tag, but not repetitively.
Here are some other useful resources on title tags:
http://www.highrankings.com/allabouttitles
http://www.seologic.com/faq/title-tags.php
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