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Title tag optimization guidelines
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revised February 2007
Many site owners tend to place "Welcome to www.fdfdf544545fdda.com"
type statements as their TITLE tag text.
This is not a good practice, especially if your site name is not relevant to your subject area. Many search engines use the
wording in a title tag as an important part of relevancy and therefore ranking.
For example, my home page title back in 2000 was originally "Taming the Beast Online". It didn't describe my site at all. All my most important keywords should have been in there. I made some changes, and at that time, suddenly shot from obscurity to No.3 on a major search engine
on a competitive term during the next database refresh. It seriously made
that much difference.
The TITLE tag should be kept between 60 - 90 characters in length. I've read many conflicting reports on TITLE length, but a good practical guide is Google.
In search results, Google currently displays only approximately 65 characters of the title - some engines display more. Keeping this in mind,
have the most important keywords at the beginning of your title.
Here's an example:
<TITLE>Web marketing resources - free articles, tools, news and reviews</TITLE>
NOTE - always remember to close your tags e.g. </TAG>
The TITLE tag can be found by viewing the html source of your page...it is always located before the <body> tag,
between the <head> and </head> tags e.g.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>This is a title tag</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<p> page content</p>
</BODY>
</HTML>
In FrontPage, editing TITLE tags is simple. Right mouse button click on a clear area of a page while in
"Normal" mode and select "Page properties'. Simply complete the field that states "Title". Click OK and you're done.
When you carry out a search via one of the major search engines, it is not uncommon for the results to show a good deal of
garbled titles, or perhaps just the URL. This is because the site owner
does not have the title tag correctly implemented, or in some cases, none at
all... There has been something else in the content that has attracted the search engine spiders
attention; failing that, the page URL is used. Why these pages rank highly
is anyone's guess, but it's probably in part due to the quality of the rest
of the site, or the number of other sites that link to it - which is another
major component in achieving high search engine rankings.
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Remember to use different, but relevant title tag text on each page of your
site - this is *very* important. Only use keywords that appear on the page
and avoid repeating the same word more than twice. If you feel the need to
repeat a word, put one instance near the beginning and one towards the end.
It isn't wise to try and fool the search engines by consciously implementing irrelevant
titles or repeating words more than twice (aka keyword stuffing) as in most
cases it will soon be detected and your page ranking will drop, or worse still,
the page or even your entire site may be removed from the index.
A good title tag will only be of benefit it the content of the page is also
solid, you've linked to it correctly and relevant outside sources have also
linked to your site; especially if they have linked to that particular page.
As with any aspect of search engine optimization, take a holistic approach.
Related articles:
New! - try our meta tag generator
Meta Tags and Zen
The importance of
link/anchor text
Other search engine
optimization tutorials
Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content, tools and software.
Web Marketing, Internet Development & Ecommerce Resources
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