Title tags – what are they and why should you care?

I’m a geek, I know it. Information is like oxygen to me, necessary to keep a steady flow at decent levels. Most of the time I am resident geek, my friends and colleagues have a more common response – why should we have to know that? Why should I even bother my brain with that information.

In this case – what’s all the fuss about “title tags”?

Well, take a look at this diagram of a search result below:

search result diagram

  1. The title: The first line of any search result is the title of the webpage.

In future posts, I’ll explain about 2 – 4 but for now, #1 is that’s the largest text and if you have one of the search words or keywords in your title – ITS BOLDED.

OK, now if you were searching for RARE BASEBALL CARDS in the results of your search you see big and bold – Rare Baseball Cards – how likely are you to click on that? I’m pretty likely myself to click on that and I don’t think I’m alone.

Guess what most of us put in that place though? Home, home page, our business name are the more likely choices if you take a look at the average site. The business name is the most common.

Straight from the mouth of Google, they say -

“Accurately describe the page’s content – Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.”

Notice they don’t say – stuff this with your keyword so it doesn’t make sense – remember where it shows up – think of the experience of the person searching for you – make it descriptive – it doesn’t HAVE to be a sentence. AND notice that they reference “the page’s content” – this is just what the content of the page is rather than every possible keyword that could apply to your site and other pages.

Remember while you’ve got a thought to the search engine, the consumers or customers looking for your product or service is the real success here. What they see and read in those results is directly co-related to what action they are likely to take.

If you’re on WordPress, read a brief recommendation on the ALL IN ONE SEO wordpress plugin that will help you set up your title tags.