Untitled Document! The Importance of Title Tags in Search Engine Optimization

It’s surprising how many sites go through all of the steps of search engine optimization, including research and analysis, writing keyword-rich content, and link building, and yet overlook one of the easiest and most important aspects of SEO – the title tag. A quick search on Google shows nearly 34 million sites who are voluntarily giving up search engine positioning by settling for the useless “Untitled Document” title.

What is a Title Tag?
A title tag is a meta tag that is inserted into the HTML code of a website. A title tag looks like this:

<title>Your Title</title>

If no title tag is specified, “Untitled Document” is used as the default. The result of the title tag is displayed at the top of the browser window when a user is viewing the page.

How Title Tags are Used in Search Engine Optimization
Title tags have three important functions in search engine optimization. First of all, a search engine spider uses the title tag as an important clue regarding the page’s contents. Nearly all major search engines weight the page’s title heavily when determining the search engine positioning. It is therefore vital to include the keywords that you are targeting with that web page in the title tags.

Secondly, many search engines such as Google use the title tag in the search engine results pages. This is an extremely important factor in convincing potential site visitors to click through to your website. If you achieve top search engine positioning for your website but seem untrustworthy in the search engine results pages, you still won’t receive much traffic. It is important to have an optimized title tag to convince searchers that your site holds the relevant information that they need.

Finally, many major directories such as DMOZ use the title of a webpage as their directory link. Because the anchor text in an inbound link is one of the factors that search engines use to determine positioning in the results pages, it is important that your keywords show up in this tag.

How to Create a Good Title Tag
Although you can put anything you want into your title tags, there are a few guidelines to follow to achieve the maximum impact from your titles. It is a good idea to keep title tags under 65 characters long, because that is the maximum that can be displayed in the search engine results pages of engines such as Google. You should try to have the keywords as close as possible to the beginning of the title. Also, avoid being penalized for keyword spam – don’t use the same words repeatedly. Finally, each search engine optimized page should have its own title, because this allows your page titles to be as relevant and useful as possible.

Title tags on your web pages require only a few seconds’ time to implement, and can give a large boost to your search engine optimization efforts. Be sure to use them effectively throughout your website.