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! Read the rest of this entry »