TITLE Tag SEO – The Definitive HTML Reference Guide for Search Engine Optimization - Advanced techniques used to improve TITLE's tag relevance - One of the most complete resources for TITLE tag SEO.
TITLE Tag SEO – The Definitive HTML Reference Guide for Search Engine Optimization
By Traian
Aug 25, 2011 - 7:35:35 AM
An internal analysis by Google, found that over 90% of
their web properties could have improved their SEO simply by optimizing the
TITLE tag format and length.
Titles are one the first things searchers see after performing a search query,
so it will determine whether or not they will click on your listing and visit
your site. It is also one of the most important on-page SEO factors. Also, when
others link to your pages, they tend to use the page title as anchor text.
Ironically, the tag came last on my alphabetically-sorted list of tags when I
started The Definitive HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization series, but it
got the entire deserved attention. I hope you will find the article useful
either you are new to SEO or an experienced search engine optimization
professional, or a marketing manager educating himself.
We know that TITLE is not really a HTML tag (it’s an element), but since
everybody calls it a tag, we will use that term, to grab some search engine
attention and, hopefully, some rankings/traffic for related terms ;)
There are tons of tips later within the article, but let’s start by debunking a
popular myth and answer one of the most common questions about TITLE tag.
Myth: most of the knowledgeable webmasters and even advanced SEO professionals think that the content
of the TITLE tag is the only piece Google uses to display the blue page titles
within the search result pages (in the sample below the color is violate since
it’s a visited URL):
Fact: The content of the TITLE tag is part of the snippet equation but it’s not
the entire part. To display page titles within SERPs Google uses relevancy
rather than blindly following your TITLE’s tag content. If your title is not
relevant to the user query, but the page content is, Google will use other
sources to display a relevant page title.
This brings us to one of the most frequent questions of Google Webmaster Help
forum:
Question: Why is Google changing/rewriting/not indexing my TITLE tag properly?
Answer: As mentioned before, Google’s mission is relevancy. To accomplish it,
they use various sources and signals, which can be onpage signals (relevant
parts from body content and headings, for example) or external sources (DMOZ or
Yahoo! directory) to match user query with relevant search results.
There are cases when search engines need to modify the displayed titles, such
as missing:
- malformed tag
- too short or too long titles
- URL is blocked by robots.txt but has lots of backlinks and they still decide
to show it to users.
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