It is important to optimize your web page’s title, both for visitors, but also for search engines. Having a relevant, and optimized page title can greatly improve your pages ranking and therefore increase your web site traffic.

Rule 1) Don’t leave the title blank
This is a fundamental, but it should be stressed. Leaving your page title blank massively inhibits your chances of getting high rankings. Even today, you may see some sites where the title simply says “Mozilla Firefox” or “Microsoft Internet Explorer” – by this, you know that the web designer hasn’t specified a title. Always make sure you specify a page title on each page - search engines prefer pages with titles that include relevant, descriptive keywords for the page content.

Rule 2) Always keep the title relevant to the content
Having a title that is completely unrelated to the content is a blackhat SEO method that some people use to attempt to get more traffic from search engines – using popular keywords in the page title, even if the actual site is unrelated to the specified title. Not only may your site be penalized by search engines if they discover that you are doing this simply to mislead people, but it actually means you won’t be receiving any quality traffic either. Instead, people will come to your site expecting something similar to the page title, and as soon as they see the site isn’t about that topic, they’ll leave. In fact, people actually looking for your site may find it harder if the title isn’t what they are expecting it to say!

Therefore, make sure you keep the title relevant to the content – make it something that is easily readable to potential visitors and also similar to the content on your page – keep it descriptive and accurate.

Rule 3) Have some relevant keywords in your title
It is well known that having relevant keywords in your page title gives it a boost in search engines. Modern search engines take into consideration not just the meta keywords, but the page title, the description, the page content, incoming link keywords amongst other things, so optimize your page title by using relevant keywords in it that people may be searching for. Try to sum up what your page is about to visitors in your title and bear in mind what keywords they may be searching for in order to find a page like yours.

Rule 4) Keep important keywords near the start of the title
This is one of the most important rules when it comes up optimizing the page title of a page - where you actually place the keywords in the title. Place your most important keywords near the start of the title, with less important ones near the future. While visitors might not notice the difference, search engines do. Having a keyword near the start of your title tells a search engine you place far higher importance on it than you do on keywords at the end of the title. For example:

“My example webpage - An example website” is better for SEO purposes than “An example website - My example webpage“. For optimizing a page, the page’s title should be before the site’s title, as in the example shown. The keywords in your page’s title section therefore get stronger emphasis placed on them, than on your site’s section of the title.

Rule 5) Don’t spam or make the title too long
A common mistake made is to make a page title very long, in an attempt to include every keyword on Earth that a user may use to find your page! This is not helpful, and nonsensical, long page titles stuffed with keywords is unlikely to boost your search engine ranking in the long term. If you were searching for an article about say gardening, and 2 results came up: one with a title that made no sense, simply full of related keywords separated by commas or spaces; while the other had a title describing exactly what you were looking for in proper English, you would likely choose the second site. Remember that although you want to rank high in search engines, you should not sacrifice having a clean page title that is easily readable and makes sense.

Rule 6) Remember the visitor!
As a final point, remember the visitor. Of course ranking high in search engines is important, but you won’t get many clickthroughs if your page title is empty, keyword stuffed or plain messy. The visitor should always come first, with search engines second: wherever possible, try to achieve a website that satisfies both, but don’t bend over backwards for search engines at the expense of the visitor.

On September 5th, 2008 by Dan Price. Filed under SEO.
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