The Importance of the Title Tag in Proper SEO

A month ago I started a series called "Essential Tags", which is basically a 101 on XHTML tags and their relation to the search engines. But for this article I decided to jump over some of the preliminaries and talk about one of the most forgotten tags, the title tag. You know how heading tags can be a powerful way to build findability in your markup code but what about the others. The title tag is simply one of the most important positions to place keywords or phrases.

Here are a few guidelines for an effective title tag.

1- Do not use it as a dump for all of your keywords. Keep it short and relevant. 12 words or less is what is recommended.

2- Make sure to make your tag readable for humans as well as the search engines.
Don’t forget, title tags are still an important part of site navigation.

3- First impression. Your title tag is the main heading and link when displayed on the search results pages. It also determines whether or not a user visits your site.

4- Write your title in a way that can be read by stat applications like Google Analytics.

Here is a tried and recommended format for a title tag:

page title | site name or organization | short keyword rich phrase

Let’s look at this format. Up front is the page title. Putting the page title first before the organization or site name gives the user a way to identify quickly the page they are on, This is followed by the site name or organization. At a quick glance the user will know what page and site they are on even if they have their browser minimized. The way you write your tag will also have an affect how you will be able to read the page traffic statistics. Normally stat pages list page view results by the page title. If you place keywords first it will be harder to follow what pages your visitors are viewing.

How you craft your title tag will have another direct effect on your users. When tags are stuffed with keywords, browsers will awkwardly clip your text if the window is not wide enough. Your viewers may not be able to view the name of the page or the name of the site they are on. This also carries on to bookmarks, another reason for a proper title tag. When your users bookmark a page in either a browser or social network these systems use the title tag to identify the bookmark. If the title tag is stuffed with keywords up front the important information like the name of the site is lost. And an important marketing fact to remember, a bookmark label that makes no sense is not likely to generate many return visits.

Finally, a short keyword rich phrase at the end of the title tag will provide viewers and search engines a quick summary of what the page is about. It is important to keep it brief and descriptive. To sum up, the title tag should efficiently notify both viewers and search engines about the title of the page they are viewing, on what site and what the page is about.

So there you have it, one humble page tag so much importance. As with all search engine optimization projects everything starts with good research and a very targeted keyword / phrase list. After you have your list, it is just as important how you use them and the title tag is right at the top.


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Author Chris Kaminski is head web designer at Lone Bird Studio, an Asheville web design and SEO company located in North Carolina.

Why you can’t separate the code from the seo

When I wrote my first web site 13 years ago nobody knew what a keyword or Meta Tag was. I did notice that in the infant days of search engines some sites were easier to find than others and put 2 + 2 together. I didn’t know it then but search engine optimization was born. Since it has grown into an industry and has gone full circle.

For awhile keywords and Meta Tags were king and queen causing web development split. One person designed and wrote the site and then you took it to someone else to optimize.

Humans being what they are the Meta Tags were abused and turned into a spammers dream. The search engines reacted by demoting the Meta Tags to reference only. This was actually very good. Competition breeds innovation, in fact I have found that by using other creative techniques you can leave the keyword and many other tags out completely.

In the next phase, SE’s (Search Engines) relied mostly on the site content and the SE wars moved there. Competition grew even more fierce. But like Meta Tags there are only so many keywords and everyone is trying to use the same words.

Again, I noticed something curious. Web sites that had been re-built to bring up to current standards would move faster and differently in the SEs. This was especially true with re-done MS Front Page sites.

Light Bulb! The cleaner the code the better the rank. Others soon picked up on this and a few years ago Google made a big deal about changing their algorithms. The other major SEs followed and now your page code has become as important as content and the new SE wars have moved there, to the code and on-page optimization.

Competition is tough here too, and to be an effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) person you have to at least understand code. There are different techniques and tricks used today through code manipulation and on page optimization, the real “meat” of a site, that it will cost you if these are ignored. And that is why the code and search engine optimization cannot be seperated.

This is the new truth of business on the Internet for the 21st Century. For your website to succeed you need your code writer / designer and optimization person / team to be one and the same. If your designer is not an SEO person then be sure they work very closely with one.

This leads to another change I have noticed, an evolution of web design companies. Because of the necessity of this closeness between development and optimization many are moving the SEO back in house. And the SEO companies see the writing on the wall too, many have shifted their marketing focus. In the past they worked mostly with end users. Now they are marketing to design companies hoping to form this new code / SEO relationship.

This is what I meant about going “going full circle”. Web site design went from the domain of the code writer and now back again. It is so important for design and SEO to melt together that I think the days of individual companies doing one or the other is rapidly coming to a close.

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Author Chris Kaminski is head web designer at Lone Bird Studio, an Asheville web design and SEO company located in North Carolina.