Leaving out your title tag is similar to a magazine leaving out a headline. Leave it out and your website is dead in the water.

 

Also, don’t make the mistake of using just your company name for your Title. The Site’s title should grab attention, hook the user and evoke emotion.  The same "hooks" in newspapers and television commercials can be used for your Title and Description.

 

Example:

For a Book Store, instead of using a Title of: "XYZ Corporation -XYZ Book Store", use "Book Store - Giving You Tools for Your Business".

 

This Title is more effective because it incorporates the main solution the company provides, and it does not include any "stop words."

 

Search engines do not alphabetize the results, so refrain from using symbols such as "!!" or "AAA" in your Title. That technique was effective back in the late 90s, it isn’t anymore.

 

Placing your most important keywords in the Title, while it was a useful strategy years ago in SEO, is no longer a requirement. It is far more effective for you to create a killer Title, one that is highly compelling and generate a top ranking through incoming links. Your Title must be readable and descriptive, don’t just stuff keywords in the Title.

 

Do not use ALL CAPS, as it makes it difficult to read and it is considered "shouting" on the Internet. Instead, capitalize the first letter of each word (when appropriate). Generally, your Title should be 5-7 words. Google displays a maximum of 64 characters, so make sure you have 64 or fewer characters in your Title. If you don’t you risk your Title not fully displaying, which can cause other problems for you. MSN and Yahoo! display more, but with the market share Google has, you must comply with their current standards

 

Here is how a Title looks that is too long. Notice the ellipses at the end. Don’t let this happen to you.

 

As I stated, in the above example the Title is too long as “Travel Web Site” is not displayed in the search result. This hurts the message being delivered and the click-through rate will probably suffer because of it.

 

Yahoo! essentially doesn’t have a limit of what they will display with 110 characters and MSN will display 70. Your best bet is to focus on Google and have your Title 65 characters or less.

 

According to testing, more characters are often indexed than which display in the SERPs. For example, Google displays 64 characters, but indexes 72; MSN displays 70 but indexes 82; Yahoo! is the only engine which displays and indexes the same number of characters, 110.

One of my mottos is “Success is 50% competitive intelligence and 50% figuring out how to do it better.” This is true for the Title tag as well. If you want to see the top scoring Titles for your targeted key phrase, type: “allintitle:keyphrase” in the Google search bar (minus the quotes). For example, if I wanted to know the Titles for “home security system” I would type:

 

Some experts will recommend using the “intitle” command. This is a mistake. In order to see the top Titles, you must use “allintitle” or the entire phrase will not be used. The above examples are the top three results. I would suggest you look at the Top 30 results to get ideas on how to make your Title more effective.

 

PageRank is a factor in the “allintitle” results, so if you have optimized your Title and your site still isn’t in the Top Ten results, you will need to turn your attention to improving the PageRank of that page, which is an Off-Page Factor.

 

Don’t use more than one Title tag per page. Although, it is allowed on some search engines, it is not a good practice, as penalties can be assessed. The most common penalty is a drop in ranking.

The Title should be the second tag following the tag in your HTML code (the character set tag should be first). If you use Microsoft FrontPage, be aware it may place the Title tag after the META tags, which may lower your ranking in Yahoo! and MSN. You will need to manually change this by clicking on the HTML tab and moving the Title above the META tags.