SEO : Title

If you were in a library browsing the books on the shelves, you would be tilting your head to one side and reading title after title displayed on the spines of the books as you walk along.

And based on the title alone you would make the decision to pick a book off the shelf, or keep browsing for something that looked more suitable.

In the same way a search engines places high importance on the Title of a web page.

Example

<html>
<head>
<title>Green Widgets</title>
<META name="description" content="Green Widgets for sale from Wonderful-Widgets.com, your no.1 resource for green widgets!">
<META name="keywords" content="green widgets, widgets for sale">
</head>

<body>

<H1>Green Widgets</H1>

<p>Green widgets first made an appearance in 1920, when the first green widget was
discovered by Sir Randolf Widget III.

</body>
</html>

Title in the browser & bookmarks

The title tag displays in the top bar of the user's internet browser. Here is our example code from above running in a browser, page where the title has been set to "Green Widgets" :

seo browser

The title is also used as the bookmark name when a user adds our site to his favorites.

Titles in search engine results

Most importantly for search engine optimization the title is used as the header in each search result:

search results

Here we see both results have the title "Weight Loss Capsules"

Writing effective titles

To rank well, page titles need to be:

concise
contain our keywords at the very start of the title
be targeted for one keyphrase only
not contain noise words like 'and' 'or' etc (which dilute our ranking)

	Do... put the <title> directly after the <head> tag, and before the other meta tags replace 'noise' words and symbols (such as 'and' 'to' '-' etc) with the pipe \| symbol eg. <title>Green Widgets \| wonderful-widgets.com brings you its latest widget</title> keep it reasonably short - while you can put up to 60 characters in a title, more concise titles are proven to be more effective
	Don't... keyword "stuff" (ie. repeat your keyword more than twice) get sidetracked - zero in on your keyphrase