April 27, 2007 Comments
This isn't a new concept, but I'm going to say it anyway because 1.) it never hurts to go back to basics and 2.) there are always new readers. If you can only do one thing to your web site to try and increase your organic rankings, then make sure that one thing is the ability to edit your title tag.
While links tend to rule the day in search, the reality is that people are going to link to you whether you make it easy for them or not. Sure, you can take steps to make it easier, but they're still going to link to you if you have good content. That's why if you've only got time to focus on one thing, it needs to be optimizing your title tag.
The code for the title tag is usually found at the top of a page's source code below where the <head> tag begins. To edit your title tag, you'll want to look for the section of code that appears like this:
<title>A Small Business Guide to Website Promotion and Increased Search Engine Traffic</title>
The title tag is the section of code that defines what shows up in the blue bar at the top of a web browser.
The title tag also shows up as the text link for your listing in the search results.
Finally, it acts as the text used when someone bookmarks your web site.
You might be asking why exactly it is that the title tag is so important for search. Well, as I've pointed out in the past, search engines are looking to replicate human judgement when it comes to deciding how important a page is for a particular topic. If you think about those three images above, you'll realize that humans rely heavily on the title tag to make judgements about a site.
The use of the title tag in the search results and when bookmarking are the best examples of this.
When it comes to search results, the title tag is the first chance that a company has to earn a conversion. A searcher scans through the first few listings on the page and makes a judgement call about which link to click based on the title tag.
This is why it's important to craft a compelling descriptive title tag instead of throwing together a long list of keyword separated by commas.
After all, which would you choose?
"Top 100 font downloads - dafont.com"
"font, free font, fonts, popular fonts, serif fonts"
or even worse...
"Dafont"
Now look at those two lines again and consider sorting through your bookmarks 3 months from now. Which one is going to be the most useful in terms of reminding you what you saved and why you saved it?
There's value in the title tag and search engines realize that.
If you haven't already taken the time to make sure that you are integrating your keywords into your title tags, then you need to make it the first thing you tackle once you've decided what keywords to target.
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