Title Tags - the Key to Success

Using title tags effectively can be the difference between potential customers finding your site or your top competitors'. This often overlooked step is of greater importance than most webmasters realize for search engine optimization.

A title tag is an HTML tag with text describing the contents of the web page. This information is part of the META description and is not visually displayed on the page. For example the HTML code of a web page may look like this:

< html >
< head >
< title >Widgets Inc. - Free Widget Services – Widget Repair < /title >
< /head >


The < TITLE > row of text is the title tag.

Who Sees the Title Tag?
The content of the Title tag is not visible on the web page itself, but is generally displayed by the browser at the top of the browser window. The title tag will be the text link found in search engine listings. So, you want it to be enticing for viewers, but also optimized for search engines. Search Engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages and will look in the title tag first for keywords when a search is requested.

What’s in a Title Tag?
The title tag should contain strategic keywords describing the contents of the page and be constructed following specific guidelines. Each engine has varied rules of how many characters of the tag they will index. For example, Google uses up to 83 characters in a listing, while Yahoo indexes 111. Some engines will index up to 250 characters of a title tag.

Keywords in the Title Tag
It’s very important that you use the keywords or “search words” that your potential customers will use when searching for your service between the title tags. Ex. < TITLE >Put Your Title Here< /TITLE > This is what will appear in the search engines to entice viewers to click on your service and what the engine will search first to find sites to match viewers “search words”.

Having keywords in the Title tag of a page can significantly increase the search engine ranking of the page for those keywords. In our little example above we used the title “Widgets Inc. - Free Widget Services – Widget Repair”. If a query was made in a search engine for ‘widgets’ or ‘free widgets’ or ‘widget repair’ this site would be a good candidate for a top listing (assuming the page contained similar content with more of the same strategically placed keywords.)

By paying special attention to what is placed in the title tags of your web pages you can improve your search engine ranking and entice more viewers to your site. Make sure you use good keywords - that match your page content - and have what viewers are searching for and you will be successful.

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