By now just about everyone knows that you
should use META tags to improve your
ranking in the big search engines. Not as
many people know that your TITLE tag also
has a big impact on your ranking. Some
simple changes to your page titles can make
a dramatic difference in how many people
visit your web site.
Each search engine uses different rules
when determining how relevant your web page
is to a particular search query. As a
result, it's difficult to develop universal
rules for improving your search engine
ranking. However, improving your page title
is one technique that applies to just about
all the engines.
If someone handed you a sheet of paper and
asked you to quickly summarize its content,
the first thing you'd probably do is look
at the page title. That's exactly what the
search engines do too. The appearance of
keywords within the page title is one of
the biggest factors determining your score
in Infoseek, AltaVista, and HotBot.
In spite of this, it's surprising how many
web sites have simple, unimaginative titles
like "Bob's Home Page." In fact,
it's not unusual to see entire web sites
that use the same title on every page in
the site!
Try changing your page titles to include
some of your site's keywords. Instead of
this title:
<TITLE>Smith Lodge Home Page</TITLE>
|
Try this one:
<TITLE>Smith Lodge: hiking fishing
horseback riding</TITLE>
|
This boosts the chance that your page will
appear in any query for hiking, fishing, or
horseback riding.
Be generous with your use of keywords. Most
engines will allow you to enter titles of
up to 70 characters. The downside of this
is that very long page titles will be
abbreviated under the "Back" or
"Go" menus of your browser. As a
result the title above might appear as
"Smith Lod...riding." While this
can be inconvenient for your site's
visitors, the traffic boost you'll get is
worth it.
Also, remember that you can use different
keywords on different pages. This will
increase your chance of matching different
searches.
Note that some search engine tutorials say
that the order of words within your title
is also important, with words at the start
of the title being given the greatest
weight. So a title like this:
<TITLE>hiking fishing horseback
riding at Smith Lodge</TITLE>
|
would receive a better score for queries
about hiking. While this may be true, it
can make your page title hard to read.
Remember that your page title will be
listed in the search results. So, while it
may boost your score, a title that lists
nothing but a stream of keywords may be
confusing and therefore less likely to be
visited. We recommend identifying your site
by name somewhere in your title.