Search Engine Optimization Tip 4 - Effective Search engine friendly Title tags, February 4th Friday 2005

Title tags are the most important tag when it comes to onpage search engine optimization, Search engines uses title tags as the title for their search engine results,

Also during Query time in search engines, They have a split of a second to crawl through billions of documents to find an exact match, So search engine engineers mostly design their query time algorithm to fetch matches from quality sites title tags first, if the match is not found they move into content and then title and content of lower level pages,



So if you run a good quality site with lots of backlinks and if the search engines consider your site to be an authority it is important every page of your site has an effective good title tag,

When it comes to google they virtually show only the first 64 characters of a title in their SERPs ( search engine result pages ) , But our experiments show they read more than 120 characters, we added some bizarre words after the first 64 characters and google did find those words matching for the query, So google reads long titles to,

We recommend writing titles of around 12 words or 100 to 130 characters, Some search engines like yahoo, MSN etc tend to show even long title in their search engine results so long title never hurts,

Some SEO experts predict that long titles dilute the effect of a title tag, But there is no evidence to this theory, it is fact that the first 3 to 6 words are the most important words in the title tag, but that doesn't mean words after the first 6 words or ignored or they dilute the power of the words occuring first,

Our basic recommendation

1. write titles which are related to the page,



2. write titles that are unique, don't just copy and paste the same title on all the pages, this is especially important when you have different pages targeting different information, title tags are the gateway to that page and if the title tag is not written properly for a targeted page you will loose google targeted traffic for that page,

3. Commas and spaces in title tag are same, But spaces look better than commas so use spaces between phrases,

4. Don't just load all the keywords on the title just target 2 to 4 phrases per page and add upto 2 phrases with good keyword combination in the title,

5. when you are targeted a particularly competitive keyword, use both singular version and the plural version of that keyword,

6. make sure the title tag syntax is proper, Title tag should be placed in the head section of an html page, Also make sure you close the title tag,

If the above guide lines is followed effective title tags will be got and they will be a powerful onpage optimization effort for your site,

Comeback for tomorrow's tip on search engine optimization from the SEO Blog Team,