Along with the description Meta-Tag, page titles are one of the most important things to consider when optimizing your site.

Why?

• This is what the Spider first encounters when crawling your pages.
• This is usually what will appear as the title of your site within the results of a search, therefore, this is the initial point of contact between your site and a potential visitor/customer.

So what should you do?

Realizing that the title of your page is what shows up in a search result, you should choose something which accurately describes what your business/site is really about. Lets take a look at an example of a bad page title:

..::welcome to my website::..

If you searched on "Mansion Tours in Upstate New York", and within the results the first line a user reads is "..::welcome to my website::..", this does not accurately describe this site is about, in fact there is nothing descriptive at all.

Lets also think about how relevant your chosen title should be regarding what the spiders are looking for.

Lets discuss the site which is about giving tours of mansions in Upstate New York.

Lets break it down into something which spiders and users would like to see:

Upstate New York Tours of Mansions - Companyname, Inc.

This lets the spider know that the geographical location is "Upstate New York", the purpose is "Mansion Tours" and the company is named "Companyname, Inc."

This also lets the user know the same thing. If the user is infact searching on Mansion Tours in Upstate New York and they see the title of your page as mentioned above, they will most likely choose that site over one which simply states: "..::welcome to my website::..".

Some more things to consider when choosing a title for your pages:

	Try and combine as many key search terms within the title as possible.
	Place the most important keywords as far to the left as possible so they appear first to the user and the spider.
	Use traditional "Title" capitalization when creating your titles. This simply makes for an easier read to the user.
	Include the name of your company within your title, but not necessarily as the first words of your title.
	Do not make your title too long. Search engines may only pick up a certain number of characters and display them within the results of a search.
	Keep the character count low but powerful to ensure an effective title. Learn More.

As we can see, page titles have a greater purpose than identifying the title of your page, titles have the opportunity to define your business in such a way that it can help a consumer decide if they would like to pay your site a visit.

Lets continue the discussion with the optimization of the various Meta-Tags which are available to you. Next Section >