Friday, August 29, 2008

How and why to brand your title tag?

You might be asking "what is a title tag?". The Title tag is a recommended 117 character (including spaces) description of a web page. It is created using an HTML title function. Visually, the tag appears in the blue bar on top of Internet Explorer and describes what a web page is all about. Any decent Content Management System should allow you to edit each page's title tag individually. Or if you are editing or hand coding in HTML yourself, you will need to set this tag for each page.

The title tag also has 2 other main uses. One is for bookmarking (adding to favorites) and the back button drop down list. Bookmarking is critical. When someone bookmarks your site, you want them to be able to tell from the bookmark itself, what a page is all about. Similarly, this page title is used when navigating through a site and using the back button.

Many websites have the same title tag for every page...how infuriating! Imagine bookmarking a website with 3 different products and then looking at your favorites later only to see that the page titles are exactly the same and therefore you have no idea which is which.

The other main use of the title tag is by the search engines and specifically on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Again using Google as the example (currently representing 71% of all searches on the Internet) they use the title tag in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Here is an example of how my company Vermont Design Works writes our title tags for the SERPs (do a search on google for "vermont design" to see the results:



Our title tags tell you a lot about what this page is going to discuss, provides a solid description for the back button or bookmarking, and is keyword driven to optimize rankings in the search engines. This is just one of the reasons why Vermont Design Works is ranked so strongly in Google.

Some webmasters don't pay much attention to page titles (or aren't compensated enough to spend time on customizing page titles or don't know how). Every page ends up being "page" or just the website name or nothing (BAD). Anytime you have tried to use your back button on a browser and pick the page you want to go back to will see the same page title repeated over and over.

Some webmasters set this tag once in an "include" file which means it will have the same format on every page. For example, it will use the page heading (the page heading is the main page heading that appears in the body of the web page) and the website address (BETTER). So the About Us page will have a Page Heading and a Page Title of "About Us".

While this is a step up from a generic title tag on every page (GOOD), doing a truly custom title tag is a BEST technique (the ratings refer to our BAD, GOOD, BETTER, BEST rating system for SEO techniques).

Title tag summary:

  • BAD: nonsense, non-existent or meaningless words used for title tag

  • GOOD: generic website term used for each page

  • BETTER: derivative page titles using page heading or navigation/menu title as title tag

  • BEST: custom written keyword driven title tags that fully describe what a page discusses

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Now that you have revealed some great SEO secrets, it's time for me to return the favor. More information on how to create the perfect title tag and optimize it accordingly with appropriate keywords, duly placed (not too few, not too many) has been provided by the Page Traffic Blog article (http://www.pagetrafficblog.com/create-optimize-title-tags-enhanced-traffic/5226/). I was really impressed by the way the article has encompassed every tiny consideration that one must keep in mind while pursuing this task.