On the Importance of Title Tags
by Pete Prestipino
Posted on 08.04.2006
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Titles tags are of immense importance to the proper optimization of your website in the search engines. Title Tags ( -> <title></title> <- ) are displayed within the top of a browser window and often appear in the search engine results pages (as the website's title). The reason to focus on the quality of individual page titles is because people use the title tags to determine the value of that page from the results pages. Here are a few "best practices" when working on title tag optimization:
Location And Length Does Not Matter: An important rule in SEO is to have your keywords as close to the top of the page as possible. When it comes to title tags, many SEO experts argue that it does not really matter where you have meta data (including the title tag), but for the sake of maintaining the sake of standardization, it should be located in the same place universally across all the pages of your site.
A Descriptive but Keyword Dense Nature Matters: More important than just dumping as many keywords or phrases as you can into the title tag, crafting creative combinations of your title tag text while maintaining a descriptive nature is imperative. Minimize the use of non-text characters (brackets, commas, dashes, slashes, and arrows), placing the keyword nearer the top (which may have more to do with the human element) and repeating the keyword(s) being focused on at least two or three times is optimal.
The objective that matters most is the click-through rate that your page and its corresponding title tag are generating. Focusing less on where title tags go and more on building title tags that are useful for the reader (as it is often good for the engines too) is really the only best practice.
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