The Title Tag: How To Use It Effectively

Meta data provides the engines with certain information. This information helps your pages to rank. It seems many people still don’t know how to use meta data the properly or will just leave it out altogether. This is a bad mistake.

Of all the tags you want to make sure you spend a little time on, the title tag is probably one of the most important tags there is. The title tag is the first tag the engines see. People make the mistake of either leaving them all the same for every page, stuffing them with too many keywords or both.

If you are trying to target more phrases or words with just one page, that’s fine, but remember, it comes at a price. The longer the trail you leave on the title tag, the less relevance to anything the search engines will give it, regardless of the order in which the phrases are used. Just don’t try to target everything you offer in one title tag. If you sell office furniture, you shouldn’t try to put “computer desks, file cabinets, office chairs” and so on in one tag. Each page is about a particular item and the tag should reflect it.

Here’s a classic example. Let’s say you were selling a solid oak desk and let’s say your company name is abcsupplies. We do some research and find out people search for “oak desk”, “solid oak office desks” and “oak office desk”. You wouldn’t have the title tag read “ABC Supplies: oak desk, solid oak office desk and oak office desk ”. There are several issues here. First, the name of the company should not be in front, it needs to be at the end. The sooner the engines find the terms, the better. The next problem is the repeating the word oak and desk is a bit much. It may not be spammy, but is less than ideal.

The best way to optimize this tag would be “Soild Oak Wood Office Desk by ABCSupplies” This places the company name at the end but now allows us to optimize for several terms in one sentence. This is not only effective for the engines, it looks good and can be read by visitors. It also makes it easier for people who bookmark the page to see easily what it is they bookmarked.

[tags]google, title tag, meta, seo[/tags]