What Are The Functions Of Title Tags In SEO
Title tags are perhaps the most important SEO tags for any web site, and if you can place your key- words in the beginning of the title tag, that improves the effectiveness of those tags much more. The maximum number of characters allowed by most search engines for title length is 60 to 65 for proper display. However, a few search engines allow fewer or more characters in a title.
Search engine spiders use these title tags as the main source for determining the web-page topic. Spiders or crawlers examine the title, and the words used in it are then translated into the topic of the page. That’s one reason it’s always best to use your keywords in your page title, and to use them as close to the beginning of the title as possible. The text included in the title tag is also the text that will appear in SERPS as the linked title on which users will click to access your page.
For example, if you have an informational web site that provides guidelines for choosing retirement funds, and the most important keywords for your web site are “retirement funding” and “retirement income,” then a page title (which is the text used in the title tag) along the lines of “Retirement Funding Options to Increase Income,” is highly relevant to the topic of the site. Spiders will crawl your site, and because the title tag is the first element encountered, the spider will “read” it and then examine your site, as well as the keywords used in other places on your site (which you learn about shortly), to determine how relevant the title is to the content of the site.
That’s why it’s vitally important to target the most critical keywords in the title tag. You may use 20 keywords on your web page, but two or three of those keywords (or even just a single phase) are the most important keywords you’ve selected. These are the keywords that should be used in your title tag.
Another important factor to remember when using title tags in your web-site design is to create a unique title for every page in the site. Make the title as descriptive as possible, and again, use the most important or effective keywords you’ve selected for the page, because the words you use in your title tag will appear in the reverse title bar, or the tab title, of your web browser, as shown in Figure 6-1.
Now that you know why you should use a title tag, the question becomes what exactly does a title tag look like, and where do you use it?
The best way to learn where you should place your title tag is to look at the source code for other web sites. As Figure 6-2 shows, the title tag is located within the head tag, along with the meta description tag and the meta keyword tag.
This illustration is taken from the actual source code for a real web site. However, it’s difficult to see exactly how the title tag comes between the opening and closing head tags, so here’s a little more simplistic view:
<HEAD>
<TITLE> Home </TITLE>
<META name=”description” content=”Technology for consumers.”> <META name=”keywords” content=”identity theft, voip, jerri ledford, books, technology, cybersecurity, spam, phishing, pharming, trojans, computer virus, malware, cyberstalking, cyberharrassment, security”> </HEAD>
If you take this code apart line by line, here’s what
<HEAD>: This is the opening head tag.
<TITLE> Home </TITLE>: This is the title tag, including both the opening and the closing code.
<META name=”description” content=”Technology for consumers.”>: This is the meta description tag, where you place a brief description of your site, keywords included.
<META name=”keywords” content=”identity theft, voip, jerri ledford, books, technology, cybersecurity, spam, phishing, pharming, trojans, computer virus, malware, cyberstalking, cyber harrassment, security”>: This tag is where you’ll list the keywords that you’re using to describe your site. These could be either organic or purchased keywords.
</HEAD>: This is the closing head tag. It indicates that the information in the header of the page has ended.
It’s important that the title tag appear somewhere within the opening and closing head tags. If the title tag is located in other places in your web-site encoding, it won’t render properly, and you’ll be left with a web site that doesn’t behave the way that you expect it to.
When creating your title tags, remember that the best title tags are those that contain targeted key- words, help develop the brand for the site, and are both concise and attention-grabbing. Usually, the text included between the opening and closing title tags also translates into the linked text that is displayed in search engine rankings. In other words, the title tag provides the first (and some- times only) impression of your web page. It can either draw in visitors or cause searchers to choose a different search result altogether.
