Page titles

An essential part of any search engine optimisation involves the use of the page title, this is the strip of text that appears at the very top of a browser window. An example of a page title as rendered in an Internet Explorer browser is shown below

Search engine spiders give page titles a lot of value, so it's worth taking the time to craft keyword rich titles for each and every page on your site. This doesn't mean the same title repeated on every page across your site, but a different title for each page. Each page title should be focused and specific to the page that it appears on. This helps to ensure that you highlight all the possible keywords on your site

Page titles also get listed on a search engines result page and consequently are what searchers will look at. If the title is appealing enough then hopefully they will click on it, so make sure that you appeal to people as well as the spiders. An example of how a page title is rendered on a search engine results page is shown below

Search Engine Titles

A quick glance at the above example shows a search result for the keyword phrase, "create favicon". This was a first page ranking at the time on Google and shows good use of the page title tag. Note how the keyword "Favicon" has been repeated to increase weight in the search engines, but contextually still makes sense to a person reading it

Remember to make sure you include your primary keywords in your page title. Too many people make the mistake of thinking that the page title is there for decoration and simply repeat the same nondescript, keyword poor phrase into the title of every page in their site. This does nothing to enhance how search engines rank your site and is doing nothing to help the marketing of your site to real people

Filter words

Common words such as 'and, or, the' are what are considered filter words (or stop words) by search engine algorithms. These filter words as the name suggests are filtered out when a page is indexed by a search engine spider or robot. Including filter words in your title does nothing for your search engine ranking, but you must remember that people also make use of this tag, so it must not only be readable to a person, but engaging enough for them to want to click on

Try to limit the amount of filter words that you use in your page titles. Use enough to make an engaging hook for potential visitors, but at the same time remember that search engines have a maximum allowable length for page titles (this differs between search engines), 7 to 8 words in total should be about right

Keyword placement

It shouldn't come as a surprise to find that where you place your keyword or keyword phrases within the page title has an impact on how effective they are to your final ranking. The best advice to give would be to say, if possible include your main keyword first in the title, followed by the next most important and so on in descending order. However, some search engines will periodically change their algorithms so as to place more emphasis on words in the middle of your title tag or even at the end of your title tag, a bit of experimentation may be needed here

Summary

Include your main keywords or keyphrases in the page title
Do not repeat every page with the same page title, but make it unique for that page
Usually the nearer a word is to the beginning of the page title the more weight it has in a keyword search
Make the page title appealing to people, to help hook them
Spell names as you would e.g. Jack Johnson, but don't capitalise every letter in your title, some directories and search engines will specify this. It's okay to capitalise every word in your meta-keywords as people don't see these, but not in your page title
The more words you include in your page title, the less "weight" count each word has, so only use the most pertinent words for each page
Page titles are important in search engine optimisation, use them well

how to use meta-tags