SEO Explained - Page 5
Optimising your HTML title tags

There are a few steps to optimising each page on your website, but the first one we’ll tackle is how to optimise your Page “Titles”.   In SEO, there are two types of “Title” that you’re going to want to think about.

Given this is the case, many people get (understably) confused by the term Page Title when its referred to in  SEO books, or online resources.  In this section, we’re referring to 1. above i.e. the HTML <title> tag that’s used in the backend of your website.   The reason it’s referred to as the <title> tag is that the actual HTML code includes the title wording wrapped in that special text <title></title> ….so in our examples, the HTML file which makes up your web page might contain:

<title>Nike Sneakers, Running Shoes, by Bobs Footwear, Atlanta, Nike</title>

The<title> tag is one of the most important (if not THE most important) single factor in your on-site search engine optimisation these days.   Google in particular, give this a strong weighting in their indexing and ranking of search results.  For this reason, we are going to cover this subject in a moderate amount of detail here.   Bear with us, as getting your titles right will serve you very well in your SEO efforts.

So how can you find out what you’re HTML title is without delving into the HTML code (which we’ll try to avoid to the extent possible in this eBook….but it's something you may have to do at some point).

There’s 2 easy ways to find out what your page titles are.

Method 1 - Web Browser Title Bar

The blue bar at the top of your internet browser shows what the HTML <title> is for your page.

Just look up at the blue “title bar” on your internet browser, and this shows the HTML <title> of each page.  So on the Salsa Internet website our page title:

Method 2 – Site: search on Google

Another way to identify what the page <titles> are on your pages is just doing a search on Google.   Google support a special search operator called Site: which is used to limit results to being just from a particular domain or website.

So searching on Google for the term:

Site:www.yourwebsite.com

….will show you all the pages on your site which Google has indexed.   The Blue link which is the title used for each search result, is actually drawn from the HTML <title> on each page:

So for instance, the Salsa Internet home page title above is “Websites, Melbourne Website Design, Search Engine Optimisation….”.   This method has the downside of not showing the full HTML title in the search results (it’s limited to showing approx 60chrs) , and so if you are fully analysing each page title, I prefer method 1 – but I’ve mentioned this second approach for an important reason.

As you can see above, the <title> tag has a dual importance.   It’s relevant to SEO in that the search engines use this as a determinant of the relevance of that page to what the user was searching for, but it’s also what is shown in Google’s search results.

For this reason when optimising you need to not only look at ensuring the title contains the right words, but also think about how this will appear to the average user in the search results.   If you make your titles meaningless gobbledygook, and just stuff the keywords into the title in random order, then a user reviewing this as part of a set of search engine results may not respond well to it.

Page 6: What to consider when building your HTML Page <title>s