TITLE Tag SEO – The Definitive HTML Reference Guide for Search Engine Optimization

An internal analysis by Google, found that over 90% of their web properties could have improved their SEO simply by optimizing the TITLE tag format and length.

Titles are one the first things searchers see after performing a search query, so it will determine whether or not they will click on your listing and visit your site. It is also one of the most important on-page SEO factors. Also, when others link to your pages, they tend to use the page title as anchor text.

Ironically, the tag came last on my alphabetically-sorted list of tags when I started The Definitive HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization series, but it got the entire deserved attention. I hope you will find the article useful either you are new to SEO or an experienced search engine optimization professional, or a marketing manager educating himself.

We know that TITLE is not really a HTML tag (it’s an element), but since everybody calls it a tag, we will use that term, to grab some search engine attention and, hopefully, some rankings/traffic for related terms ;)

There are tons of tips later within the article, but let’s start by debunking a popular myth and answer one of the most common questions about TITLE tag.

Myth: most of the knowledgeable webmasters and even advanced SEO professionals think that the content of the TITLE tag is the only piece Google uses to display the blue page titles within the search result pages (in the sample below the color is violate since it’s a visited URL):

Fact: The content of the TITLE tag is part of the snippet equation but it’s not the entire part. To display page titles within SERPs Google uses relevancy rather than blindly following your TITLE’s tag content. If your title is not relevant to the user query, but the page content is, Google will use other sources to display a relevant page title.

This brings us to one of the most frequent questions of Google Webmaster Help forum:

Question: Why is Google changing/rewriting/not indexing my TITLE tag properly?

Answer: As mentioned before, Google’s mission is relevancy. To accomplish it, they use various sources and signals, which can be onpage signals (relevant parts from body content and headings, for example) or external sources (DMOZ or Yahoo! directory) to match user query with relevant search results.

There are cases when search engines need to modify the displayed titles, such as missing:

- malformed tag

- too short or too long titles

- URL is blocked by robots.txt but has lots of backlinks and they still decide to show it to users.

About the Author

Traian has almost a decade experience in SEO and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, a Vancouver SEO based company that provides Internet Marketing services to SMB clients around the world. For more information visit http://www.pitstopmedia.com

Author (artsubpsm). Submitted on Fri, 26 Aug 2011 Time: 5:20 AM

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