Desert Web Designs Blog

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) what most people don’t realize is that poor title bars can be a severe detriment to your ranking. Believe it or not, keywords in the title tag are extremely important when it comes to your search engine ranking. When searching through any search engine, results in the search engine results pages (SERPs) are listed under the page title located within the <title></title> tag. These are the bold faced headers that you see on the SERPs. In addition, the higher an item or text appears on the page, the more weight it is generally given as far as keyword relevance. Therefore, the keywords present in the page title are one of the first things the search engine spider sees so it is important space that is not worth wasting.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is putting your site or company name in the title bar. This is almost as useless as having the phrase Welcome to in the title bar of your pages. If you clicked the link, you would notice that 54 million pages returned with the phrase “Welcome To” in the title? How are you supposed to compete with that? Why would you want to compete for the phrase “Welcome To”? Does it have anything to do with your business? My guess is probably not.

As I said before, putting your domain or business name in the title tag is one of the biggest mistakes many people make…At least to a point (I’ll explain this in a minute). Why? Consider this: If someone knows your business/domain name, are they going to be searching for it in Yahoo! or Google? No, they’ll go directly to it. So why would you want to use that in the title tag and waste the keyword space? According to the W3C, a good title tag should be 64 characters, spaces included, so don’t waste it. If someone is running a search for your business or business type you want to be optimized for the phrase that they may be searching for, not for your business name. Of course you’ll come up ranked very high for a search containing your specific business name. But where you really want to show up is under the phrase that people would find you were they searching for businesses of your type. The reason I say “to a point” is that I’m not saying you should exclude your title altogether. Having it in the title bar is fine, but I would recommend putting it after your keyword words/phrase.

When it comes to search engines, content is king, and a good title bar should mirror the page’s content. Not only should a title bar contain quality keywords for search engine optimization, but should still be easily readable to a search engine visitor. A title bar should, in essence, be similar to a newspaper headline. If someone is browsing through the SERPs, your title bar needs to grab their attention that it piques their interest to the point they want to click the link to your page.

Look at it from a user standpoint. If you were searching for a website for classes say on “Underwater Basket Weaving” and came across two websites, one said “Home Page” in the title bar and was ranked a couple places higher than one that says “Underwater Basket Weaving Classes and Instructional Material”, which one would you be more apt to click on? I’m gonna put my money on the one that is ranked a little lower but is more descriptive. I’m also going to bet that the second would be ranked higher than the first, but there could be other factors at play that would cause otherwise. But that’s another blog.