Introduction
Generally, on-site SEO includes numerous techniques. The first pure on-site ranking factor is the title tag. The title tag should be composed very wisely depending on the subject of each page. Basically, the title tag shows the difference between two pages to the search engine crawler. Imagine 2 books in a library; One can differentiate them by titles only.
There are several basic rules for a proper title tag:
- The title tag must reflect what people are looking for; Use Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool to find the best phrases
- The title tag must reflect the page's content
- The title tag should be as short as possible, however don't limit it to 1 or 2 words if there people are searching
- Nouns do help; An example: Any of these techniques doesn't work is bad, but Black-hat SEO doesn't work in long term works much better!
- Just like above, don't overload title tags with "the, an, a, of, at, ...". However, words such as about, information, advantages, disadvantages really work!
- The title tag must be eye-catching and must be usable as the anchor text leading to the particular page
- Never uppercase every word of the title tag
Advantages
The major benefit of a wisely chosen title tag is a great potential of getting the top10 rankings for less competitve phrases. There is no way how to obtain top positions for very competitve phrases/keywords in search engines such as
Google,
Yahoo or
MSN, but to get numerous links of a good quality. Unlike very competitve phrases with unbreakable competitors, phrases with lack of competitors are usually beaten very easily. For this purpose, you’ll need nice title tag.
Example
In my experience, people are getting visitors via various phrases if they run a directory. Their website’s theme might be dedicated to computers, but once they install a directory with many categories and they’ll name each category properly, they’ll start getting visitors via such phrases sooner or later. Man can say that these irrelevant phrases don’t mean anything to the website, but it means if you run
Google AdSense within the directory and/or your site.
Conclusion
The title tag must be composed in the sense of the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag too. Don’t try to overload the tags, since they need to look naturally as much as possible. Generally, title tags should be stored in the database, where it’s easy to modify them. Even if the title tag doesn’t mean what it meant 10 years ago, it’s still one of the most important factors of the on-site SEO.
Originally published on July 27, 2008; modified on 24 September 2009