Free Website Promotion
As part of our free website promotion guide, we continue with website titles, and their effect on positioning your website in the search engines. This free website promotion resource will help you achieve better rankings in Bing, Google, MSN and Yahoo.
Website Titles
What Are Website Titles?
Website titles can be seen at the very top of your internet browser. Each page of your site should have a separate title. The title should contain keywords that pertain to the subject matter of the page.
In order to insert the website title at the top of the internet browser, go to your source code.
The source code controls how a webpage will look. Search engines can 'see' the source code.
To access the source code, go to the top of your internet browser and do the following:
Internet Explorer:
Click on 'Page', then 'View Source'.
Firefox:
Click on 'View', then 'Page Source'.
Now find the title, it will be near the top, and in the <html> section of the source code. here you will find the <title> parameter. This is where you will insert your title for that page.
To familiarize yourself with website titles and how to optimize them, lets first take a look at some real life applications.
First, find the source code of the page you are on now (using
the method described above).
As you can see, the source code for this page is as
follows:
<html>
<head>
<title>Website Titles | Free Website Promotion</title>
<meta name="description" content= etc....
As you can see, the title of this page is 'Website Titles | Free Website Promotion'
Using our furniture example from the Keywords section, lets begin the process of writing a website title, and at the same time optimizing it for better search engine rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo and MSN.
First, lets take a look at the description for our fictitious furniture site from the Meta Tags section:
<meta name="description" content=
"Unfinished furniture manufacturer of contemporary and modern
hardwood furniture. American made furniture including
bookcases, credenzas and cabinets for bedroom, living room and
home." />
As you can see, we have utilized many of our important
furniture related keywords in the description. Lets use the most important keywords from the description to make a title.
In this case, I would create a website title something like:
<title>Unfinished Furniture Manufacturer, Contemporary, Modern Furniture Manufacturer</title>
With this example, we have utilized several of our good keywords. The search engines will see the following phrases, all of which are contained in our website title:
Unfinished Furniture
Unfinished Furniture Manufacturer
Contemporary Furniture Manufacturer
Modern Furniture Manufacturer
Unfinished Contemporary Furniture
Unfinished Modern Furniture
Unfinished Contemporary Furniture Manufacturer
Unfinished Modern Furniture Manufacturer
Contemporary Furniture
Modern Furniture
Now you start to get the picture, the search engines 'see' a plethora of keyword combinations. Thus, you should think about the way keywords are combined, when writing a website title.
Important Points and Tips:
- Capitalization and commas are ignored by the search engines.
- Since each page of a website is different, you should use a different title on each page. Hence, you will be found in the search engines for many different keywords.
- Don't go overboard with the length of your title, it may get you penalized. A good maximum length of a website title would be around 75 characters. Anything shorter than that is fine.
- The beginning of a title is seen as more 'important' to the search engines. In other words, use your most important keyword phrase first.
- The website title should coincide with the text of that page. Its important to use your good keywords in both your title and your text. We will be discussing this further in the 'On Page Content' section.
So, now that we have our <Title>, <Description> and
<Keywords>, lets put them all together:
<html>
<head>
<title>Unfinished Furniture Manufacturer, Contemporary, Modern Furniture Manufacturer</title>
<meta name="description" content=
"Unfinished furniture manufacturer of contemporary and modern
hardwood furniture. American made furniture including
bookcases, credenzas and cabinets for bedroom, living room and
home." />
<meta name="keywords" content=
"furniture, unfinished furniture, modern, contemporary,
manufacturers, wood, bedroom, living room, home, online,
bookcases, credenzas, cabinets, hardwood, made in the usa,
american made, oak, wooden" />
</head>
That's it. Now you have the basic definition of website titles. Good luck!
Read more:
» Website Promotion Guide
» Keywords
» Meta Tags
» Web Page Content
» Effective Link Building