SEO Tips: The Value of a Good Title

Perhaps one of the most important elements of your search engine optimization efforts should be your page title. The title tag, which appears within the <head></head> section of your html page, and uses the <title></title> code, appears at the top of the browser window displaying your web page. A valid page title will be in Proper Case (ie, This is the Proper Way to Capitalize a Title), and each page's title should be unique. Do not use the same title for every page of your website.

Your title should be able to stand alone and tell your visitor what is on that page. If a visitor bookmarks your page, the title will be what they later find in their bookmarks. A page named "Home" or "About Us" does little to tell the reader who you are! It is also essential to put your business name and clearly indicate your purpose in the title of the home page of your website. Failure to do so can lessen your credibility online!

This is how the Firefox broswer displays a web page title

The title is also used by almost every major search engine as the title viewed in your search results for that page.

Google's search result listing for the main page of this website:
This is how Google shows the listing for We Have A Site's index.php page.

And this is the Yahoo! listing:
This is how Yahoo shows the listing for We Have A Site's index.php page.

Without a proper title, your web page will not only be hard to find, but could actually result in it being over-looked altogether by the search engine robots which crawl your site - and those human visitors, as well! In addition to indexing your page, the <title></title> tag is also a required element for a valid html page, and valid pages are also important for sound seo practices.

But how long can your title be? Google crops to complete words at 66 characters. That's actually a surpisingly large amount of room if used wisely. But Google is not the only search engine you are going to cater to and Yahoo!, for example, will allow titles up to 120 characters. You want to be certain the most relevant information is within the first 64 characters (for bookmarks). To help plan the appropriate length for your titles, you can use our page length tester.

Without a proper, unique title for each page of your website, you are overlooking perhaps the most important element of search engine optimization.