Creating a Title Tag for Search

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Creating a Title Tag for Search Engines

By Derek Vaughan

Ever wonder what is takes to make your website rank more highly in the top search engines? Have you ever been frustrated by a search engine neglecting to include your website in an important business category? Well, if so, read on.

During my recent work with numerous small and medium-sized online business clients, I have noticed that many of these website owners are great at running their business - but struggle with getting traction at the major search engines. I have also found a common thread which connects these businesses - and if corrected - can make a huge difference in their search engine rankings. That common thread is the title tag, meta description and meta keywords of their sites.

In determining what your website is really all about, search engines typically use two general measures: 1.) who links to you and what text they are linking with and; 2.) on-page text particularly focusing on the text at the upper portion of the page (also often called ''above the fold''). The title tag, meta description and meta keywords fall under the category of on-page optimization. In brief, search engines examine a website's title tag and meta data, and then parse it to make an educated guess about which search terms are most relevant for that page's content. Today we'll be focusing in on the title tag of your website.

Here are the steps to get your website's title tag to be the best it can be for your particular business:

First off, let's understand what the title tag is and where you can view it. In the upper left corner of the main bar of the Internet Explorer(IE) browser (most statistics report 84% of Internet users or higher are using IE) there is some text on every website you visit. The beginning portion of this text is usually visible when you minimize a browser window. This text is displayed from the website's title tag -and it's vitally important to every commercial website.

The title tag is easy to see in the browser, but it originates in the underlying code used to design the website. If you 'right click' on a website with your mouse you will see a display box with several menu items listed - if you click on 'View Source' - you will see a text display of the underlying code for that website. Here are the first few lines of underlying html code from one of the TechPad Agency websites:

<html>
<head>
<title>Dedicated Servers, Reseller Web Hosting News</title>

In the html code, the title tag is proceeded by the <title> tag and ends with the </title> tag- the text that appears between these two tags is what will appear in the browser in the main display bar at the top.

''Okay - I get it!'', you might say. ''So I can put any message I want in there to sell the goods and services of my site''. That's true, but remember that the title tag is important for a much broader reaching reason: search engines treat your title tag as an indicator of your site's main purpose, and therefore which categories and search terms to place it under.

If you want to be found under a specific search term in search engines, you must include that term in your title tag. Let me sat that again so that you don't miss the importance of this:

If you want to be found under a specific search term in search engines, you must include that term in your title tag.

So how do you determine which search terms are best to include in your title tag? There are many great tools available for free to assist you in creating a compelling title tag. We'll look at two of those -Google Trends, and the Yahoo! Search Marketing keyword suggestion tool.

Google Trends is an interesting tool that lets you see the relative amount of searches conducted at Google for (mostly) higher volume search terms. You can also compare several terms at once to see which receives more Google searches.

Google Trends is located here:

http://www.google.com/trends

Let's use for our example a hypothetical website that sells cellular telephones. Suppose that the website owner has several ideas about which terms to use in a title tag:

cellular phone
cell phone
Nokia phones
Cingular phones
mobile phones

So which of these terms is likely to drive the most traffic if it is well ranked in the Google search engine? Using Google Trends we can enter each term into the input box - either individually or using up to four phrases separated by commas - then observe the graphical results.

The order of this list ranked by search volume according to GoogleTrends then becomes:

cell phone
mobile phones
Nokia phones
Cingular phones
cellular phone

I would then suggest using a great tool from Yahoo! Search Marketing which will help you find other popular search terms that can help you generate more traffic to your site. It is located here: http://www.eovt.com

Begin by typing a search term into the input box. In our example I typed in our most popular term - cell phone. Below are the results (shortened considerably to save space).

Searches Done in Previous Month
Count	Search Term
4181697	cell phone
961060	cell phone plan
7547	nokia cellular phone
5358	samsung cellular phone
4750	us cellular phone
4153	verizon cellular phone
3809	sprint cellular phone
3430	lg cellular phone
3177	unlocked cellular phone
2868	cellular mobile phone wireless
2854	cellular phone battery
2754	cingular cellular phone

The data represents actual searches performed in a previous monthly period through Yahoo! Search Marketing, 'Count' is the number of searches performed and 'Search Term' is the search phrase the user typed in looking for products and services online. As you can see, if our cell phone website were to use the phrases ''cell phone'' and ''cell phone plan'' then the vast majority of searches related to cell phones would be covered.

In conclusion - the title tag which will attract the most traffic if the website can achieve high search engine rankings would be something like, ''Cell Phone and Cell Phone Plans from ABC Company''. A couple of extra quick tips:

Keep your title tag relatively short - no more than about 10 words.

Place the most important items up front in the title tag (this is probably not your company name).

Position Technologies, Inc. was founded in 1995 and pioneered the first pay-for-inclusion program with Yahoo/Inktomi, which has grown to become the model for the Search Industry. Mr. Detlev Johnson, Vice President of Consulting with Position Technologies stated regarding title tags," The importance of writing titles cannot be understated. Keyword stuffing is a mistake. Branding and clicks are too important. Search engines credit terms found in titles that display to users. The optimal length for a title is shorter than 50 to 60 characters. Longer titles are cut off in search results, in browser windowpanes, and make poor bookmarks."

While there are myriad important activities that will result in great search engine placement, there is no substitute for a rock solid title tag. Give it some thought, and use the tools, techniques and suggestions mentioned above, and you should have a great title tag for your site that helps you get more website traffic.

Derek Vaughan is the Senior Editor of The Hosting News, a website devoted to bringing web hosting news and information to website professionals. Mr. Vaughan is a freelance writer on topics ranging from search engine optimization and webmaster tips to web hosting and Internet marketing.