Your Title Tag: The New Keyword META Tag By Pamela Upshur At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Do you start with one of your targeted keywords when constructing your Web site's title, or is it the third or fourth word of the site's title?

In many ways, the Title tag has replaced the keyword META tag, and many people would argue that this has effectively become the keyword META tag.

What is a Title tag?

A title tag is the first HTML element of code that appears at the top of your Web page whose contents are displayed in the title bar at the top of the Web browser.

Listed below are tips on how to create an effective page title:

Use your targeted keywords in your page title.

Nothing will improve your ranking more than placing your targeted keywords into your Title tag. Think about it. If your very first words are in the site's Title tag, they must be the most important or so thinks the search engines.

Be persuasive

Search engines will display the title for your site in the search results so it should be descriptive while meeting your search engine optimization goals at the same time. You shouldn't miss an opportunity to be persuasive. Use it as a call to action to click, commit or buy in some way. You shouldn't leave the searcher guessing. They should know exactly what they will get on the other side. Your goal is to get positioned for your targeted keywords phrase. Adding extra words will dilute the message. Just stick with your best words and call it a day.

Repeat your title as the headline.

A good way to drive home the subject and strengthen the meaning of your page is to repeat your Title tag words as your page title.

Do not spam your Title tag.

If you stuff your title with every possible combination of word that applies to your site, you will run the risk of getting dinged as "spam" by Google. Google's spiders knows what is legit content and what is blatantly constructed to artificially improve your rankings.Don't do it.

Avoid Using "Stop Words"

During the indexing process, most search engines conserve resources by eliminating certain words that have little or no value as search terms: these are called "stop words." They are very common words, such as "a," "the," "and," "of," "that," "it," and "too." With all of these commonplace words eliminated, the data-handling algorithms don't have to manipulate such hugh volumes of information, thus increasing processing speed.

If your site contains stop words in areas where a spider looks for copy to index, the stop words are ignored. In some cases this can affect how your site is indexed. For instance, suppose you wanted to be indexed as a "system analyst." There are some search engines that will skip over the word "systems" and read only "analyst." So you would be indexed under "analyst" as opposed to "systems analyst."

The inclusion of stop words in critical locations in your title may also create problems with search engines where prominence of a keyword in the title is crucial for the search engine's ranking scheme. By having the first word in your title be "the," you could damage your ranking.

If a stop word is part of your site's name or title, you should either put it in quotes or come up with another name or title that doesn't included the stop word. The use of quotes indicates that the word has a special, reserved" meaning and should not be overlooked. Since each search engines works with its own list of stop words, it pays to do your own testing. Do a search for any keywords with which your are concerned, and take note of which ones it stays were ignored on the search page.

In conclusion

If your are interested in ranking well in the search engines, you should know how to write an effective page title. This will take you a long way if you do it the right way from the start.

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