How To Optimise Title Tags
Author: Steven Balfour

HTML title tags (< title >) are currently the most important
on-page factor when optimising your webpages for search engine
results. For the majority of search engines the title tag is the
first point of call to summarise the theme of a webpage and to
help rank that webpage accordingly within their listings.
Obviously there are many other factors that generate the overall
ranking but optimising your title tags right will generally
provide results for your targeted search terms.

Target Individual Webpages Towards Search Terms

For search engine optimisation, it is vitally important that
your website has individual webpages with content targeted
towards keywords and search terms. Each of these webpages should
have their own unique title tag that includes the search terms
you are hoping to be found for within search engines.

How People Search

Think about how you would type in a search into a search
engine. It is unlikely you would type in a phrase such as "How
You Should Optimise Title Tags". There is more of a chance that
you may type "How Should I Optimise Title Tags", but people tend
to shorten the total words needed to type a phrase as much as
possible and will be more likely to type "How to Optimise Title
Tags". Search engines would pick up the all above variations but
by targeting the most popularly typed phrase you are increasing
your chances of ranking better for that search term. There are
many keyword tools on the Internet that allow you to research
which keywords are popular and how searches are being typed.

Variations of Prime Keywords

If your website is targeted towards a certain group of keywords
and search terms, then use the webpage title tags to target
variations of your main keywords. For example, the main titles
on our website are targeted towards "Search Engine Optimisation"
and "SEO". Notice how within our SEO blog articles we sometimes
use variations such as "Search Engine Optimising for Long Tail
Search Results" and the title of this post "How to Optimise
Title Tags". By doing this you can catch more visitors for a
variety of possible related search terms.

Put Search Terms First

The closer the keywords are to the beginning of the title tag
the more relevant and more weight that webpage will carry
towards that keyword. So for example if your webpage had a title
of "red widgets & blue widget" and another website's webpage had
a title of "blue widget & red widgets", if you did a search for
"blue widget" then the other website more likely to rank above
your website (if all other factors are equal) simply because the
search term is nearer the beginning of the title tag. A lot of
companies put their brand terms first and then the page title,
which is good if you are a recognised brand as it builds
confidence and provides familiarity to potential visitors and
may help encourage click from search listings, but it can be a
slight disadvantage if you are looking to rank higher than a
competitor who puts brand terms at the end of the title tag or
left them out completely.

Another good reason to put the search term nearer to the
beginning of your title tag is that search engines use the title
to provide the link to your webpage in their listings. There is
limited space (68 characters in Google) for your title within
the search engine listing so it is important to make it obvious
what the webpage is about.


About The Author: Steven Balfour writes search engine
optimisationhttp://www.bal4.co.uk/ articles for various blogs
and websites. http://www.bal4.co.uk/