Select good page titles to improve search engine position.
The title of your web pages are one of the most important elements to optimization and can dramatically affect the placement of your site on search engines.
The page title is the text between the <title> and </title> tags in your page header. Selecting the right words between these tags will affect your site's effectiveness.
Why page titles are important
To some search engine spiders, the title of a web page is more important than any other element of the page, including the content.
Some search engines will rank your page title first so it must include your most important keywords and phrases.
Search results will often only display the title of your page and it is this that web surfers see when running a search.
When a visitor bookmarks your page or adds it to their favourite selection, it is the web page title that is displayed to identify that page.
Most search engines do not permit you to influence how the summary text of your web page is displayed, but the page title is most often left unchanged.
Choosing the right page title
There are three things to consider when creating your page titles ...
- it must contain the keywords and key phrases for that page
- it must be compelling and interesting to web surfers
- it must be accurate and descriptive of your web page
Let's consider our own web site. We trade under the name of 'Saffas' but we would not choose to use a page title simply as ...
Welcome to Saffas
This doesn't explain what we do or what you can expect to find on that web page. Instead, we would use something like ...
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Free help and advice for optimizing web pages
This tells you exactly what you can expect when you click on the link to visit the page. It also includes some keywords which will be picked up and used by search engines.
A good page title will help you increase search engine placement and drive more better quality visitors to your site.
