The title tag is a really important, yet often overlooked aspect of good web design. I think it gets overlooked so often because it hides up there at the top of the page with all that meta, xmlns, http & charset gobbledegook.

Or, sometimes your good intentions to ‘fix those title tags’ after all your pages are built gets forgotten in the joy of finally finishing the web site.

Poor little title tags.

• They are what search engines see as a good indicator of your web pages content
• They are what people see in the results list of their search queries
• They are what people see in thier bookmarks folder

How should you use the title tag?

Opinions vary, as do the search engines importance on them. But, it seems a good web design practice to use them for every possible advantage they may hold.

1. Make them precise and indicitive of your most important keywords
2. Don’t waste space with ‘Welcome’ or ‘Homepage’ or stop words like ‘as, the, a, or, and’
3. Make your title about 40 to 60 characters (including spaces) long
4. Company name? Nope. Use descriptive, searchable keywords instead
5. Put your most important keywords in the first part of the title

How often do you think the title tag is overlooked? Try this google search for ‘untitled document‘ (the default title tag in Dreamweaver). There are over 97 million results.

Check out how many sites have ‘Welcome to‘ in their title tag. Wow, over 200 million.

By making the title tag a simple focus in your web design practices, you can make a giant leap over your online competition.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, 30 Days of Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.