SEO 101: The Importance of Titles
Try any search on Google and you will notice something that all the top ten listings have in common. Did you spot it? Generally speaking most of the results will contain the search term in the title. For example, try this search “Home Information Pack” on Google. The first entry returned has “Home Information Pack” as the page title. Simply by putting your target keywords into the titles of your pages you will improve your rankings. It is as easy as that.
To save you having to do this search yourself, here is the first result currently returned:
Additionally, you should think about what keywords you are targetting on each page and reflect this in the title of the page you have about 60 characters to play with; if you go over this you risk your title being truncated in the search results. It is a very common mistake to use the same title on every page.
If you are not sure what the title is it is what is diaplayed at the top of the browser window:
It is also used as the default text when a visitor adds your site to their favourites, which they will all do of course, so you should try to inlude your site name n there too.
Most web publishing systems will allow you to configure this somewhere whether you are using Dreamweaver or a content management system. It is configured in the ‘head’ section of a HTML page using the title tag <title>Appropriate Title</title>
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Comment by Tim on 12 March 2008:
What do you mean by title?
Comment by Tony on 12 March 2008:
Thanks Tim, this is not very clear I will update the post to make it clearer.
Comment by Abhishek on 1 April 2008:
I recently noticed that on one of my sites that the sites ranking higher are having their title tags optimized while mine weren’t - so made a few changes! Lets see the SERP’s in a few days!
Comment by Jason Hipnotik on 28 April 2008:
I can say with full confidence that titles are extremely important as Tony says. Also, descriptions. I recently wanted to up my ranking and try my hand at some proper SEO, so I tested and optmised for one specific key phrase, the title was a major part and after around a week and a half I was 1st in google for the selected search term from being 100+ previously, and that’s with a pagerank of only 1 and very few of what google sees as “backlinks”.
Comment by ashish on 1 May 2008:
Yes it draws attention of masses if the title is catchy. Good title also increases chances of getting more hits on social networks like digg.
Comment by adam on 10 May 2008:
Is it possible/advisable to optimize and change existing page titles in blog posts and re-post them again, even though they had already been published and indexed? (Sorry, I have no idea about that.)
Comment by Tony on 12 May 2008:
It is possible to change content and titles at any time to further optimise for your keywords. If you have a page that is doing well for a keyword but not in the top 10 then a little tweaking can get it on the first page.
Comment by HIP on 20 May 2008:
It is something I am trying to implement at the minute and your advice here has been well recieved. Here is hoping the difference is seen shortly. What length of time does it take before these improvement effect SERP?
Comment by Tony on 20 May 2008:
It really depends on the search engine and how often your site is being visited by search engine spiders.