The Title tag is the title of your page. It is the combination of
words on your browser next to the close and the minimize icons. It is a
short description of what your website is about. It is mostly created
for the search engines to have an idea of the content of that page,
although the first few words are readable by humans.
The title
tag is the first meta tag the search engines see when reading your
website’s code, the other meta tags include the meta description and
the meta keywords.
It is not visible on your website design or content but they are in
placed in the header code for the search engines to read. To view a
page’s title tage you can look at the bar on the top of each page
(where the minimize and close button are located). The words that
appear on the bar are the title tag of that page.
When trying
to come up with a title tag, think of variations of the key phrases
you are targeting on that page, write these down. With these
key-phrases on hand, use a keyword research tool like overture to see
common ways people are searching for these terms. You can use this to
create the perfect combination of words to have an effective search
engine optimized title tag. The title tag should not be any longer than
20-words but ideally 100 -150 characters long is what is recommended.
The
keywords and keyphrases you use on your title tag should match the rest
of your head code. Use the same keywords on your title tag, your meta
description, meta keywords and lastly on your page content, specially
on the first paragraph. You should have one main keyword or keyphrase
targeting that page, as well as two or three minor keywords. The more
keywords you have per page, the more diluted these keywords are. The
reason is because all keywords are competing agains each other on the
page to see which one is the most important.
Before you start
writing title tags, meta keywords and content you should plan which is
the keyword hierarchy you will have on the page. Plan your content
accordingly and then create your title tag and other meta tags for the
search engines so they know the description of your site and show it
on the search results for that specif keyword.
Once you have your meta tags created on each page of your site you are ready to submit your website to the search engines.
