Possibly one of the easiest SEO fixes, but one of the most commonly overlooked, the title tag is a major determinant of how search engines view your page. The title tag is like the name of a book printed on its cover: no author would have a cover without a title because the book will never be found, yet there are millions of untitled web pages.
The main reason the title is important is that search engines give considerable weight to your content in determining where the page should appear in search results. In some cases, the title may be more important than the content of the page in determining its meaning. Consequently, the title should communicate keywords and ranking relevance to help ensure that the page is indexed correctly in the first place.
The second main reason is that a page title is copied directly into the first line of any search result, so in order for a visitor to click on the result, it must be relevant to their search. The search terms that the user has entered in their query will appear in bold in the title, so the more terms that match, the more the title will attract their attention.
To optimize appeal to both search engines and potential visitors, the ideal title tag has the following attributes:
keyword phrases– Unless you have a well-known brand, most visitors will search using thematic keywords rather than your company name directly. You need to make sure that the search terms most likely to find your content appear in the page title.
Company Name: Your brand should appear in the title of the page, although you may receive more traffic if it appears after keyword phrases (eg, “Bay Area Accountant – Beswick Accounting”).
Brief and descriptive– Don’t spam the title with repetitive keyword phrases and keep the length to 10-12 words max. Search engines prefer shorter titles, and visitors will look for relevancy in the title, ignoring unnecessarily long phrases.
Only: Search engines look at pages, not sites, so for best results, each page should have a different title, optimized for the keywords on that particular page.
How to change the title of a web page
In an HTML file, the title meta tag is located in the header:
</p> <p> <HEAD> <TITLE>One Uproar – Web design, SEO SEM and Social Media for your business</TITLE> </HEAD><br />
In the example above, the title appears on the first line of search results and will appear in the title bar of most browsers.
Web page editing programs will often display the title tag as part of the page properties. The ideal length for a title tag is less than 70 characters, although Google will read the entire title tag and truncate longer ones (especially if the search terms are at the end of the title). For best results, you should stay under 70 characters, as your goal is to immediately convey what the page is about.
Placing search keywords towards the beginning of the title tag can sometimes lead to more clicks; it’s worth trying out different titles to see if the company or keywords first perform better. Don’t forget that you’re also writing titles to sell your pages and invite clicks, so the title needs to appeal to human readers and not just search engines. You should look at the HTML of every page on your site and immediately fix any that have missing or unhelpful titles.
The title tag is also used as a title for bookmarks. If a user bookmarks your page and doesn’t have a useful reference, they likely won’t come back through the bookmark again. This is another good reason to make sure your headline is compelling and different for every page.
