OK, this is for all those people I keep telling about TITLE tags.

For search engines, it is important for categorisation, and for their understanding of the context of your page, for your to select an appropriate TITLE tag. It is one of the most important things you can do to help your content-rich site get recognised by Google and Yahoo, and the other engines. Please, please, please do not underestimate the importance, or it may well see your site rank far lower than it would be if it were well titled.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, maybe I can attempt to explain how to better your TITLE tags.

Firstly, without any doubt at all, you’ll need to individualise your TITLE tag, for each individual page on your Web site. By this, I mean make the TITLE tag relevant to that page, and not a general ‘My Sites Name Goes Here’ type tag.

This blog is named Alex Sains.com, and it is of course acceptable to mention that, but you do not need to put the name of your site above all other information you’re trying to convey. Thus, this article begins with the name of the post, and ends in “Alex Sains.com”. This places the words I am trying to convey to Google and Yahoo, etc, into the path of those crawling engines. It will notice the article pertains to information on TITLE tags, and will thus rank it fairly based on this information, assuming the content within the page is relevant to it.

To conclude, then, use TITLE tags that relate strongly to the content of the invidiual page you’re attempting to promote. If you’re trying to promote a sub-page of your ‘Newspapers’ page, ‘The Sunday Times’, a reasonable TITLE might be “The Sunday Times - Newspapers - Your Site Name”. If you find these titles become too long (and try to limit them to no more than ten words), elide the “Your Site Name”, as it’s in effect the least important option here.

Best of luck re-titleing your Web pages!

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