As we have all heard, titles are a very important part of anything. Especially when it comes to designing web sites, the title says it all. The title element is how your site is understood by your visitor and also by search robots. In the past people would stuff their titles with as many keywords as they could think of to ensure that search engines would pick up the keywords and they would rank higher. That really isn’t the point and so search robots ever since have given less importance to titles.

Don’t give up on titles yet!

Don’t get me wrong here, titles are still a very important part of SEO and should never be ignored or disregarded.

The best thing to do is to say exactly what is on the page, this is going to tell the visitors and search robots exactly what is going on and what they should expect to find on the page. You don’t want it to be off topic. Include only pertinent keywords in the titles for the specific page that is being requested. A simple sentence will typically suffice.

For example, on my article titles I will have the name of the article come first and then my name. The reason I do this is because that is what the page is about. It seems obvious, I know. But take a look around at some web sites and you will notice that some people will go pretty far to keyword stuff their page titles hoping that search engines will rank them higher because of it. However, as we all know we aren’t making web sites so search engines are browsing them. We are making web sites so people can browse our sites and hopefully come back again because we did something right.

Web sites for people? What about SEO?

The most effective use of titles for SEO purposes is without a doubt your ability to catch the users attention in the SERPs. What I mean by this is that when you are searching for a site, you aren’t looking to see which page has the most relevant keywords to your search. You are looking for the site with the most specific titles to your search. You are looking for a title that makes sense based on what you searched. I assure you that you are going to pick “Web design best practices for beginning designers” over “WEB DESIGN XHTML CSS SEO TRAMPOLENE DEVELOPMENT PHOTOSHOP DREAMWEAVER BILL GATES,” and you know how I know this? Because we have been conditioned to avoid spam and ugly titles.

It’s not all about getting to #1 for your keyword phrase. It’s about getting that visitor to click on your link so your result creates traffic. I’m pretty sure that is the reason we have a web site, to generate traffic for it. Whether it be for sales or for readership, we aren’t building sites to get #1. We are building sites to get people to come to our site and click on our link in the results pages. We are building web sites for people to visit them.

It’s all so simple, just make your web sites geared towards getting people to visit them and the search engines will take care of the rest. Relevance is key in generating traffic.

Popularity: 4%