Search Engine Optimization Guide for Beginners

Search Engine Optimization is a topic that confounds beginners and advance web designers alike. Even after been around for so many years, a lot of web designers are still clueless about various factors affecting a website's Google rankings. Here is basic information on a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization: Title tag.

Title Tag is one of the most crucial factors in achieving high search engine rankings especially in Google. Title tag plays an important role in usability of a website, therefore, search engines have placed so much premium on this oft forgotten element of a webpage. Many times placing the right title tags of your website pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings on Google and other search engines. Moreover, because the text in the title tag is what appears in the Anchor text on the search engine results pages (SERPs), changing them may result in more traffic to your site.

According to w3c:

“The TITLE tag defines the title of the document.
The title element is required in all HTML/XHTML documents.

The title element:

-defines a title in the browser toolbar
-provides a title for the page when it is added to favorites.
-displays a title for the page in search-engine results.”

So, it's the Title of the document. That gives pretty good indication about the value of this tag.

Most of the times in website pages, a title tag has “Untitled” in it as text. That's almost criminal! This kind of title gives neither the user nor the search engines any idea of what the page is about. It's not difficult to imagine that such pages will very rarely attain any kind of top rankings in Google and other search engines for any of its keywords.

The number one rule while creating title tag for your website pages is – Title tags should be unique, accurate and relevant. The TITLE tag should be placed within the HEAD tag of a website page. Also, you should create a unique title for each page on your site, which helps Google know how the page is different from the others on your site. Avoid same title tags throughout the site. It will confuse the search engines and it may harm your website's prospects on search engine results pages.

The title for your website's homepage can have the name of your website or company name. It should include other important information like you services, products and the location of the business or where your services are offered.

Make a title that clearly showcases the topic of the webpage content. You should strictly avoid choosing a title that are irrelevant and have no relation to the content on the page. Search engines may see that as an attempt to spam them and penalize your site accordingly. Generally, try using brief, but descriptive titles. Long titles won't be beneficial since Google will only consider a portion of it and show the same in its search result.

Author: Aniruddha Badola