Search Engine Optimization and Your Webpage Titles
One of the main ways the search engines find your site is by looking at how your title each page. This is a lot like going to the library and looking at the titles on the shelves or the titles and the old card catalog or the titles in their electronic search system.
If you look at the top left hand corner of your web browser (like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox) you’ll see the title of the web page. In this case, it’s similar to the title of this post: “Quick Fixes for Big Search Ranking Improvement: Title Tags.”
Just like in the library, if the title is obscure or doesn’t use the words that you expect it to, you probably won’t think it’s the right choice. Because search engines work mostly of the text the same thing is true for them. If your web page title does not match up with the content on your page or the words that you hope people use to find you, it has much less of a chance coming up high in the search results.
And just like in the library, it’s important that each book–or in the case of a website, each page–has its own title. It will do you no good if every page of your website has the same title. In fact, if search engines discovered duplicate titles on a web site they’ll sometimes try to come up with their own title instead that will likely not use the keywords you want.
“Make sure that each page on your site has a useful and descriptive page title (contained within the title tags). If a title tag is missing, or if the same title tag is used for many different pages, Google may use other text we find on the page.”
How To
We’ve already seen how you can check what the title of a web page is…just look in the upper left hand corner of your web browser for that page. Now’s take a look at how to change a web page title.
Changing your title tag depends on what system you’re using. If you’re using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla you can usually change the title tag from the edit page view. If you’re using a web site development software like Microsoft Front Page or dream weaver or Intuit’s homestead, you can edit the title using the page options. Or, if you only have access to the HTML code, you can change the title by editing the title tag, which looks like this:
<title>Your title here</title>
