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Why Page Titles are Critically Important to Your Website

Guest post by: Bill Golden

Article Overview: Just as a book and chapters have titles, so must your website also have main and sub-page titles. Too many website ignore this very important component of a web page or website and this can seriously hamper search engine optimization efforts. We will learn here, why page titles can make or break your website.

Why Page Titles are Critically Important to Your Website

Just as a book and chapters have titles, so must your website also have main and sub-page titles. Too many website ignore this very important component of a web page or website and this can seriously hamper search engine optimization efforts. We will learn here, why page titles can make or break your website.
Page titles are what are displayed in the top left area of your web browser. Sometimes they contain helpful information, but more often than not, they contain either nonsensical information or no information at all. Following, is some great information that will help you develop the best page titles for your website.
Search engines really value your page title. Search engines are programmed to treat page titles like you would treat the title of a book. A book title needs to either grab your attention or give you an idea of what the book is about. The same goes for chapter titles. You would never think of writing a book with silly, meaningless page and chapter titles and you should not do so with your website either. Remember, the title of your listing in a search engine result is taken from your page title, so make it a good one!
Each page must have a unique, relevant title. Many websites have the exact same title for every page on the site. This is practically wasting a great opportunity and is not being very helpful to either your visitors or search engines. Don’t capitalize every letter of your title and avoid using strange symbols or characters.
Use your most important keywords in the title. Review your web page content and then come up with a title that uses your most important keywords for that particular web page and a title that also makes sense to the reader. You may use a particular keyword a couple of times, but don’t go overboard with it.
Make sure that the title makes sense. Your page title should read like a normal sentence would. Don’t have a page title that just lists a bunch of keywords, separated by commas. This is not helpful to your website visitors or search engines and just plain looks tacky.
Manage both your visible and non-visible title area. You may use more characters in your title than what your browser displays. Using Internet Explorer as an example, you have around 98 ??? text characters for your title content before running into “- Internet Explorer”. However, it has been proven that search engines can read much more than the first 98 characters. If your title is too long, a word can get chopped in half and that can look bad. You can use blank spaces to push your additional text beyond the “end of line” so that the additional text is no longer displayed. This is a great technique and it works!
Keyword stuffing is a bad idea. Don’t fall into the trap of using the title line to list a string of keywords and nothing more. Your website visitors are looking for a page title and this is just a list of possibly relevant, yet not very helpful words.
There you go. You are now on your way to having much better titles than you had before. Your website visitors will thank you and search engines will reward you with higher page rankings! Happy titling!

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Article Tags: engines, keyword, page, page titles, search, search engine optimization, title, visitors, web, web page, website



Related Forum Posts
Re: Does Your Website Have a Robots.txt File? - HI Carol, Your robot file is correct; no lets work on your Page Titles & Meta Data. Do you have access to create different page titles for each page of your website? Do you have your FTP information...please do not post it here but just let me know if you have access. Jeff
Re: New Keyword Research Tool - Hi Evan, Yes, this is a great tool for long tail keywords in Google PPC and great for researching articles & Page Titles. It is better than Google PPC if you really want to break down your keywords and go after a large amount of low volume keywords. Anelly, WordStream has a paid user interface that I would try out. Jeff
Creating unique forum post titles - Hi Evan, As one of the people who spends the most time in these forums, I don't really think it's a sustainable idea to ask users to create unique "Subject Titles" for every post. Even forum loyalists (including myself) are bound to forget on occasion, while the average user won't even care. Instead, would there be a way to leave the "Subject Titles" blank and only allow posts with manually created titles to be submitted? Most people would be too lazy to copy the original title and would therefore be forced to think of a new one (which would likely be unique).
Re: What works for you? - Hi Yinka, I work better under pressure of deadlines when I am doing something for other people. However, I like to have the leisure to develop my own projects. The first case is what Stephen Covey calls a "Quadrant 1" activity ("Important and urgent") whereas the second case is a "Quadrant 2" activity ("Important, not urgent"). We should aim to make as much time as possible for Q2 activities so that we can develop our own projects. Easier said than done!
Page Rank Changes - Hi Kevin - there is a lot of speculation as to why so many websites lost Page Rank. A few new sites that I've been following also got Page Rank for the first time. Every time Google does a Page Rank update there are websites that get caught in the crossfire and have to work to get their rankings back up!


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