BT broadband office

7 ways to boost your search engine rankings with the title tag

Posted 18 January 2007 at 10:39AM by Alexa Williamson in Website development

Getting a good placement or 'ranking' in the search engines is not an easy feat. One often overlooked technique is the optimisation of your title tag.

The title tag, <title></title>, displays the text that appears in the bar at the top of your browser. The title of this blog, for example, is 'BT Business blog'.

Search engines generally place more value on the title tag than on 'keywords' in the HTML code. Here are a few tips to make your title tags more effective:

• Put yourself in your visitors' shoes. Ask yourself who your ideal visitor is and which search terms would they likely use to search your website?
• Make your title text relevant to each specific page of your site. Eg if you sell digital cameras and your business is called 'Gadgets for You', it would be worth titling the page that lists digital cameras 'Digital Cameras from Gadgets for You'
• Make sure all spelling and grammar are correct
• Avoid using unusual characters unless they are absolutely necessary
• Don't use too many words in the title. Google, for example, displays a maximum of around 60 characters including spaces. MSN shows about 70
• Don't include vague terms. Eg, a car dealership is unlikely to get a top ten search results spot for the term 'car' because there is so much competition. Something specific like 'Ferrari 308' is likely to give better results
• Don't stuff your title tags with keywords. Eg, putting 'car Ferrari car' in a title tag may penalise your site in the search results

Further reading:

• All about title tags (Highrankings.com)
• Web page title tags (SEO Logic)

Tags: search engine ranking, website title tags

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