Proximity Marketing testblog

The title of a page as it is entered in the meta tag in the source code of your web page merits your most thoughtful consideration.  Regardless of whether you own a carefully built mini-site or a slowly developed, mature authority site, the title for each page needs to be carefully decided upon for several important reasons.

Search Engine Optimization: If we look back to the early days of the short history of the Web, search engines seemed to look first to the self-identified keywords of a web page to classify its topic.  Unfortunately, foolish webmasters abused their trust and to spam the keyword tag area.  As the search algorithms became more sophisticated, the title tag became the most important of all the meta data.  Thus, in comtemporary times the title tag is one of the major determining factors in search engines determination of the content area of a web page.  This issue is important enough that many businesses decide to outsource the function of professional keyword research.

Browser Top Information: While some web users may not notice it, the words used in a page’s title tag appear at the top of a browser.  However, some other users do rely upon that as a quick clue to the page’s major topic and may make a determination about reading the page based upon that.

Header for Search Listings: At the top of any individual listing in a search engine query is the page title, taken directly from the title tag.  That is what is hyperlinked to take anyone who clicks it to your page, which of course is your goal.  It stands out because it is underline and a different color (blue) from the description.

Bookmark Text:  Although any visitor can elect to change the text, the title tag supplies the default wording for any bookmark that the user enters into her or his browser.

I’ll summarize with some helpful tips in assigning your meta title tag. 

1. Choose a title for your page that is simply your primary keyword  If you consider it important to do so, you may include multiple keywords in the title, however you should rank order those, putting the most important keywords first and separating each keyphrase with a space, punctuation such as a dash followed by another space.

2. Make sure the title you choose will stand out to someone who has executed a search when your page appears in the results of a particular search.

3. Assure that the title is simultaneously as brief as possible and a truly accurate description so that it is useful to the visitor who sees it in the top of the browser window or in a list of bookmarks that have been saved to the computer.

4. Don’t use the word “home” as your complete title of your home page.  That adds no value to your SEO or your users’ experience unless, of course, the page happens to be about the concept of “home.”  You can, of course, use that word as part of a slightly longer title, such as “Home of Best Widgets.”

5. Periodically you may want to conduct an experiment with the title of a page to see if an modification has a positive impact upon your search engine optimization, just as you would experiment with any important variable related to your site and its individual pages.