The basics
We will now look at what a title tag exactly is. We will look at why title tags are so important, and how you can write them better for your website.Lets start at the begining, what is a title tag? In essence this is a clue to the content of the webpage, you could say its a summary of the web page which can then be passed to the search engine, a simple one line title. For the user the title tag is lable they will find in the top left hand corner of their brower, and in the search results these can be seen as hyperlinks.
Now Lets look at a real webpage.
Type in www.amnesty.org
In the top left hand corner you will see the title tag. “Amensty internatinal working to protect human rights world wide” This is title tag for this page.
If you want to read the code of the title tag, in internet explorer click view, then source. This will now open up the code. It may look rather confusing with all the informatin displayed, however all we need to look at right now is the title. You will find this 7 lines down from the top.
How To Write A Title Tag
Now we have looked at what a title tag is, lets look at how to write one, and some of the important considerations you need to make. The title tags an important piece of information for search engines, and it should be a summary of your webpage. In order for the title tag to show on Google, Bing and Yahoo its requried to be 63 characters or less in length. You should also try use a keyword or a keyphrase which relates to your page in your title tag.
Finally its important to write a unquie title tag for each of your website pages.
Now lets see why a title tag is so important, lets go to Google and type in a very popular keyphrase “mortgages”
You will now notice the top 10 results for that keyphrase , what you will notice is the URLs present are actually the title tags for each page. If we click on any page, you will see the title shown in the search results, present on the webpage bar at the top left hand side of the explorer page.
You will notice the keyterm mortgages appears within all title tags present on the search results.
Examples of Good and Bad Title Tags
Now we shall look at some good and bad examples of title tags.
Firstly a long list of keywords, this is a bad example of how to write a title tag. A title tag should be a description of the page, not a long list of keywords.
Another poor example is “untitled document” . You see this quite often when people dont enter title tags, similarly “welcome to my site”. Again it tells the search engine nothing about the theme or the content of the page, and will be useless to the visitor.
Finally your domain name being present in the title tag is yet another poor example. People can see this in the information in the browser, they dont need it in the title tag.
A better example of an title tag might be Mortgage broker – professional mortgage advice at a London Office.
This might be a keyword “mortgage broker” along with mortgage advice , or even mortgage london.
This title tag manages to put the information in concise form and does this in under 63 characters and makes sense to someone reading it.
Title Tags Summary
Title tags are easy to edit you can use notepad , wysiwyg , dreamweaver , and also you will find most content managment and e commerce suites allow you to edit the title tags
- Remember to keep them to 63 characters or less, so they can be read in full on all major search engines.
- Include a keyphrase in the title tag, and make sure that keyphrase is relevant to you webpage content.
- Title tags for every webpage