Neglect Title Tags at Your Own Peril & dash; You Have Been Warned
Ask any search engine optimization expert and they will tell you that without a doubt one of the big 3 SEO must do’s is the title tag. Title tags are weighted as part of your overall SEO score and they provide a chance to plug particular keywords and your company name. A title tag is an HTML tag with text describing a specific web page but is not displayed on the actual webpage. If you are using internet explorer you can see the title tag in the blue bar across the top of the screen, please see the example below.
Title Tag Example 1:
As you can see I have targeted two keywords and offered the location of my company. For each one of the pages on your website the title tag should appear differently and the description should be written to reflect the information on the page.
What Does a Title Tag Look Like?
You can recognise the title tag by looking at the HTML code on each page. The source code will look like this: <title></title> code snippet. Here is an example of what the title tag of this blog post might look like in source code
<title>Title tag tips 2010 – a simple guide|mitash.com</title>
The Three Key Functions of a Title Tag
Title tags are a great search engine optimizer and have three primary functions.
- Title tags define a title in the browser toolbar.
- Title tags provide a title for the page when added to favourites.
- Title tags display a title for the page in search engine results.
The title tag is such an effective search engine optimizer but is very often neglected because people don’t know how to configure the title tags within the back end of their website. Quite often tags are set to default to mimic a page title or the first few words of a blog post. This is acceptable but doesn’t exploit the potential of the feature. If you have a blog then you need to manipulate every title tag to your advantage. If you are unsure about fiddling around with HTML code and how to set title tags in WordPress or any other content management system, ask a search engine optimisation expert to set things up for you and then afterwards you should be capable of going alone.
