SEO - Website Page Titles

Written by Brad Traversy | 24 July 2010

Many people do not realize the importance of web page titles. Titles hold TONS of weight in search engine ranking. Some webmasters focus solely on keywords and meta tags when in reality they do not hold near as much weight as they use to. The search engine algorithms have changed. If you want your web page to come up for a certain keyword then put that word or phrase in the page title.

When you title a web page, you tell the search engine and the user what the web page is about. All of us have seen the one sentence summaries in magazines, newspapers and TV guides. It allows for quick referencing and decision making by telling us what the page, article or show is going to be about.

This is one of the reasons that naming your page titles is so crucial to getting your site ranked well. There are TONS of sites on the web that have just the company name or even "untitled" in the page title. The webmaster of these sites obviously has no SEO knowledge what so ever or just does not care.

Having the company name on all the pagescan be sort of a branding strategy, chances are, your visitors do not know your brand name yet and are looking for a service or product that you are selling. You can add the company name into the page title, but it should be shown after the main keywords that you want to use.

Every page should have a different and unique title. Websites that are selling multiple products/services should have a unique title for each one. You must take the time to make the web page stand out or you will not get good results for that page.

You should try to place your keywords in the title. Search engines rank each pageseparatley, so it's very important to use the proper naming methods.

Aim for a 4 to 6 word title. No less and deninitley no more. Search engines only display 58 characters in the title the rest is then truncated and will not be visible to the reader. The longer the title is, the less weight is given to each of the words.

Always keep the reader in mind first when creating your page titles. Some phrases may rank well in the search engines but if noone is searching for it it is useless anyway. Sometimes the words and phrases work out for both the user and the search engine which is the goal.