Today’s visibility tip is all about your title tags.

Video Transcript: In terms of visibility, the title tag is one of the most important components of your web page. Yet, for whatever reason, I see sites every day that don’t take advantage of it. Too often I see sites with a title tag of just their site name or company - on every page of their site - or, even worse, a long, jumbled string of keywords. That’s not going to accomplish much beyond making your site look spammy and cheap.

In terms of search engine optimization, the title tag is one of the most important aspects of your HTML page insofar as helping search spiders understand what your page is about.

Beyond crawlers and spiders though, the title tag is also extremely important to the users of your site. That’s because the title tag is the text that will be displayed at the top of the browser window. it will also be the text displayed in the navigation tabs if you are using a browser that supports tabs like firefox. Either way, it’s an easy way you can help people navigate your site.

One of the most common mistakes concerning title tags is just having one title for every page on your site. Every page on your site has a different focus or theme.. As such, you should have different tile tags for every one of these pages. Search engine spiders are coming to your site every day (hopefully) and their job is to figure out what your pages are about. If every page on your site is titled with just your business or domain name, you aren’t really telling them too much they don’t already know.

Think about it this way, search engine results don’t point at sites as much as they do pages within a site. As such, it’s a lot more effective to individually target and title the pages within your site to maximize your exposure to the internet spiders and make it easy for them to distinguish the pages within your site from one another.

Likewise, for your human users browsing thru your site wiith 10 tabs or windows open all over the place - if every one of those tabs or windows all just say yourcompanyname.com, they’re going to have a really hard time keeping track of what’s what.

If you were in the widget business for instance, you wouldn’t want the title of every page on your site to just be:

<title>Widget World, home of the web’s finest widgets. - WidgetWorld.com</title>

Trust me, neither the search spiders nor the end users care if this is indeed the home of the world’s finest widgets. Make your sales pitches elsewhere.

When you’re creating your title tags, it’s important ot have your most important keywords early in the tag. It’s generally accepted that words towards the beginning of your title tag are counted as being more significant than words later in your title tag. As such, you want to include the name of your site in your title tag - you want people to be able to easily idetify your pages from the title tag, but you should do it at the end of the tag, like we see in our example:

<title>Title Tag Tutorial - Jayde.com</title>

Now, let’s say you have a site that sells widgets. You’ve done your homework and have a separate page dedicated to each type of widget you sell. Each of these pages needs a unique title tag as well. Let’s Say you sell baseball widgets, soccer widgets and hockey widgets. Each of those pages should have it’s own dedicated title text.

If possible, it’s always good to be even more specific. If your company sells widgets for baseball, and you have separate widgets for left handed vs. right handed players you might try to make a page specifically for that and be sure you include that information in the title.

For example:

<title>Left handed baseball widgets for sale - WidgetWorld.com</title>

You want to think about query strings - in other words what words or phrases will people search, that this page should result for. Look at the content of your page, thiink about what that page is most specifically about and then create your title tag using the most specific and logical terms you can, followed by your business or domain name for branding/easy identification.

So, here are a few points you want to keep in mind insofar as your title tags are concerned:

- Create a unique title tag specific to every single page of your site

- Use the most important keywords early in the tag

- use your company name in every tag - towards the end

- Think about query strings (what are people going to search for)

- avoid hyperbole, sales pitches, and slogans

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