Page Title Tag Done Wrong

Page Title Tag Done Wrong

Why the Page Title Tag is Important

When the Web was created, it was created around the idea of pages and links being the fundamental units of data. The page title tag is one of the most important attributes on the page. It is the first thing that search engines show site visitors about your site, and it is the text of the link that site visitors click on when they visit your site from search engines. Most search engines place much more weight on the page title tag text than any other on page element.

For some non-competitive terms a good page title alone can land a page a top search results.

First of all, we will cover bad ways to write page title tag text:

1.      “Get ur drugz here!!!!! paxil, prozac, Zoloft buy now, Internet pharmacy, Viagra, pills on wholesales, antidepressants, weight loss, Phentermine…”

2.      Untitled document (comes from not putting in a title tag at all)

3.      Site > category > sub-category > item

4.      “Welcome to Fred’s store” (from page title tag)

5.      “Welcome to Fred’s store” (title of the entire site and from the page title tag)

The goal of the page title is to give search engines and readers a brief description of what that page is exactly about.

Problems with the Examples

1.      It is true that the page can be about any specific topic (even prescription drugs or casino stuff or pornography), but the title should not be a loose array of selected somewhat similar terms. You could pick any topic and focus on it, but not on a topic range. If you focus too widely with the page title you dilute the value placed on each word, and, in the rare event the page does rank, you may be sending visitors to a page that is not relevant to their needs, and thus does not convert. A large part of effective SEO is ensuring that visitors land on the most relevant page possible.

2.      Many pages on the web do not even have a title tag. Unless one was trying to list well for untitled document, not having a title tag makes it hard to generate any traffic. In the Yahoo! Search index, there are over twenty million pages sporting the “untitled document” title. They would get much more traffic if they titled their documents.

3.      Many content management systems are terrible for SEO purposes. The words at the front of the page title are the most important. If the first few words of every page are not very descriptive, it does not give engines much to determine the difference between pages. Many spam site generators start page titles with the same words in every page title. Make sure your page titles are unique to each page, with the most descriptive words at or near the start of the page title.

4.      First of all, people probably have no idea what Fred’s store is. Is Fred’s store a hardware store? A discount shoe store? A Viagra store? You just don’t know. Neither do search engines.

Placing salutations or unnecessary document references in the title kills the keyword weighting of the title. I always say “Welcome to…low rankings.” Just for fun, I did a search on Yahoo! to show how many sites had the following in their page title:

1.      “welcome to…” (close to 30 million)

2.      “home page” (over 15 million)

3.      “wecome” & “welcom” (thousands of entries each)

5.      Notice there is no difference between example #4 and example #5. A title should be a page title or document title. The title should not be the site title. If, for branding purposes, you feel you should place the site title in the title tag of every page, it is advisable that you place it at the end of the title—that is, unless you are so big that people are likely to search for your name already (Nike, Pepsi, Coke…). The page itself is a fundamental unit of data, not the website!