The Almighty Title Tag

While it might seem that the page Title Tags and Meta Tags aren’t very important, it’s quite the opposite.  Most notably, the Title Tag is arguably the most influential on-site component of the search engine’s algorithms.  If you want to rank for a keyword phrase, it should be in your Title Tag.

The Meta Tags are much less effective because of heavy spamming in the late 1990’s, but are still an important component that should not be overlooked.

Your rankings will not only be affected by doing your tags the right way, but doing them the wrong way could cause lead to problems that are easy to avoid.

So…what is a Title Tag?

A Title Tag is essentially one of the most important components to your site’s rankings other than the content itself (and of course the quality links that you’ve acquired as well).

If you want to achieve high search engine rankings, it is recommended that you fix your title tags to make them not only unique, but also to optimize them for the terms you wish to rank well for.

The Title Tag is what shows up at the top of a browser and what also appears within the results of the search engines – that notorious clickable link on the search engine results page – when listing the top ranked sites.  With just the fix of your site’s Title Tags, you are sure to receive appreciable differences among your rankings.

Keyword Phrases

Title Tags should contain keyword phrases that you wish to receive desirable rankings for.  You can include, and it is recommended, that you include your company name within each Title Tag – preferably at the end of the Title Tag.  You will receive better results if your targeted keyword phrase is placed toward the beginning of the Title Tag rather than leaving that open to insert your company name.

Most importantly, make sure that your Title Tags are relevant to the copy found on the page each Title Tag is intended for.  You should not be writing a Title Tag about basketballs if the page you are writing it for only features baseball equipment.  However, it is imperative that you refrain from copying a string of text found from the content of that page into the Title Tag.  As mentioned above, each Title Tag should be of unique, well-optimized content.

Brittany Passante
Search Engine Optimization Manager