Why the Page Title is Important in search engine optimization

When the web was created, it was created around the idea of the page and the link being the fundamental units of data.

The page title is one of the most important attributes on the page. For some non competitive terms a good page title alone can land a page atop search results. Let us see the bad ways to make a page title.

1. "paxil, prozac, Zoloft buy now, internet pharmacy, Viagra, pills on wholesales, antidepressants, weight loss, phentamine..." this is absolutely not the goal of the page title

2. "untitled document" this is absolutely not the goal of a page title

3. "Welcome to Angela’s store" this is absolutely not the goal of a page title

4. "Welcome to Angela’s store" this is absolutely not the goal of a page title

The goal of the page title is to give search engines and readers a brief description of what that page is exactly about.

Problems with the Examples:

1. It is true that the page can be about any specific topic (even prescription drugs or casino stuff or pornography), but the title should not be a loose array of selected somewhat similar terms. You could pick any topic and focus on it, but not on a topic range.

2. Many pages on the web do not even have a title. Unless one was trying to list well for "untitled document" this title makes it hard to generate any traffic.

In the Yahoo! Search index there are over twenty million pages sporting the "untitled document" title. They would get much more traffic if they titled their documents.

Yahoo! Search: allintitle:untitled document

3. First of all people probably have no idea what Fred’s store is.

Is Fred’s store a hardware store?

A discount shoe store?

A Viagra store (going with the pharmacy theme)?

You just don't know. Neither do search engines. Placing salutations or unnecessary document references in the title kills the keyword weighting of the title.

I always say "Welcome to...low rankings". Just for fun I did a search on Yahoo! to show how many sites had the following in their page title:

a. welcome to (close to 30 million)

b. home page (over 15 million)

c. welcome & welcome had thousands of entries each.

The misspelled words are even sort of competitive.

4. Notice there is no difference between example #3 and example #4.

The title is a page title or document title.

The title is not the site title. If, for branding purposes, you feel you should place the site title in the title of every page it is advisable that you place it at the end of the title.

That is, unless you are so big that people are likely to search for your name already (Nike, Pepsi, Coke...)! The page itself is a fundamental unit of data, not the web site!

What do you say ?