The TITLE Tag

The TITLE tag is one of the most important items to consider when improving your site's ranking in search results. Thankfully, it's one of the shortest and easiest things to fix.

Search engines place more or less emphasis on text depending on where it appears on the page. The text in the TITLE tag gets more emphasis than any other area of your page. The worst thing you can do as a webmaster is to create a page without a title. But if you perform a search for intitle:untitled document, you'll find more than 9 million pages committing this crime. On the BU Web, there are more than 7,500 pages with untitled titles.

In addition to being important for search engines, the TITLE tag is equally if not more important for users. Even if you somehow manage to claw your way to the top of the search rankings with an untitled page, the user may not click to view your page because you haven't told him or her what's on the other side. And users, for the most part, don't like surprises.

Some tips for writing titles:

• Titles should be from 50 to 80 characters, including spaces. Some search engines truncate titles longer than 80 characters.
• Include one or two of your search words in your title, though you don't want to cram your title full of search words or else your title may be considered search engine spam.
• The title for each page should be tailored to that page. The exception would be your site's home page, which should describe the site as a whole.
• Make your title enticing. Remember: Your real goal is to get people to visit your site, not just to appear high in search results.
• Descriptive titles can be more helpful for users than breadcrumb titles. A breadcrumb title is one that reflects the site's directory structure, such as BU | WebCentral | Learning | Google | Optimizing Your Site | Code | TITLE Tag.
• If you use breadcrumb titles, consider ordering them from specific to general, such as TITLE Tag | Code | Optimizing Your Site | Google | Learning | WebCentral | BU, because it puts the most relevant information first. When the title appears in search results and bookmarks, users will be able to recognize what the page is about more quickly.