Your TITLE Tag

Here's a website design tip that everyone should know.

THE TITLE TAG IS PERHAPS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT TAG ON YOUR PAGE

<TITLE> Don't use your company name, unless you are CNN or Pepsi or some other company with massive name recognition, no one is going to be searching for you using your company name. You need to incorporate as many of your important keywords into the title as you can. The title is what appears at the very top of the browser. You know, the colored strip across the very top of the screen. That is where your title tag is visible. In most cases, the title tag is what the search engine looks for first.

It is not important that your title convey any special meaning to the person visiting your site. Your title should be written with the search engines in mind. It is important to place your keywords into this tag. If you are selling a money making opportunity, you would want your title to use terms like... earn money, fast cash, cashflow, home worker, online income. I think you get the idea. But I don't advocate using the word money as a keyword for reasons I will discuss later. Use words that describe your site. Words or phrases that real people would actually use to try and find you. The length of the title tag can vary. If you have several important keywords and they are used on your page, it is OK to use a lot of them in your title, but a good guideline is to try and keep your title tag to somewhere between 7 to 15 words. And a word of warning. Don't even think about putting money, money, money etc as your title tag. The search engines are getting smarter and they will classify this as spam, and then, Poof, your page has been dropped completely.

A special note to those using some earlier versions of Microsoft Front Page. Front Page has a knack of placing your title tag AFTER the meta tags. This is not acceptable. If you are using MS Front Page, you will need to manually edit this information.