Sometimes webdesigners get low blood sugar, or suffer minor head injuries. The effect? Bad HTML title tags.
Title tags are an important piece of real estate on your page. In properly structured HTML, it’s the first chance for you to tell human prospects and search engine visitors what your page is about. Depending on the search engine, page titles are someytimes shown prominently is results – your page is likely to be passed up if it doesn’t look relevant to the potential visitor’s search. Think about your page title as an advertisement for your website!
Since I’m feeling snarky today, here are three things NOT to do when creating your title tags:
1. “Welcome to our website”
It sounds like a friendly greeting for your human visitors, but it completely ignores the wonderful gift that a title tag can be. A title tag is a chance to tell both human and search engine visitors just how helpful your content is. Use this chance to target keywords that BRING and CONVERT traffic.
2. “Unititled Page”
If your web designer is using Dreamweaver, hope that they are properly caffeinated when they are working on your page. Otherwise, they may forget to change your HTML title tag from the default. Don’t expect quality traffic when you are one of the almost ONE MILLION pages that have “Untitled Page” as their title.
3. “Welcome to Adobe GoLive”
You can probably guess where this default page title came from. Check out the ONE MILLION crappy page titles. Oh, that’s neat: version 6 is out. I think we can see what they DIDN’T improve.
What SHOULD you do in your title tags? Keywords, focused sets of keywords. More on that in a later – and less snarky – posting.