The TITLE element (not Title Tag as many call it, but will be using the phrase “title tag” in this SEO article for SEO reasons) of your web page (found within the HEAD) is very important, probably the most important part of a page (especially for placement in Google and Yahoo) and should ideally be SEO optimized for a small number of keywords or key phrases. The title tag is an essential part of a web page that appears on your browser’s title bar and is a short description of that page, and the most important keywords should go first.

The Roles of the Title Tag in a Web Page

1) First, the title is used by resource librarians, directory editors, and other webmasters when they link to your page. If you present editors with a well written title, your site will be reviewed faster and will get favorable treatment by the editors. If you submit a page with a title like this, "Title Tags - Title Tag Limit - Title Tag - Web Page Title - HTML Title Tags," then you can expect to wait for a review.

2) Second, the title is displayed in the search results as the most prominent piece of information available to searchers

3) Third, the title is displayed by the visitor's browser in the border of the viewable screen as the visitor is viewing your website. This serves as an anchor so that the visitor knows where he or she is on your website. For this reason, titles need to clearly relate to their page and should include bread crumb or mouse trail information if there is space available.

4) Fourth, the title is used by the major search engines as the most important piece of information available in order to help them determine the topic of your page, and thus to determine the ranking of your page in their search results. Given that the title is the most important factor in your page's ranking, it can be very tempting to load the title tag with keywords. For the first three reasons mentioned above, you should avoid the temptation

Title Tag Optimization

Let’s get on to tips on how to compose it effectively for SEO.

1) Homepage vs. Internal Pages: Your homepage gives you the most production and should have the most power. Your site’s internal pages should be built in support of your homepage, should act as a supplement to your homepage’s optimization efforts, should get into far more detail about your site, but should be able to stand on their own two feet in terms of ranking abilities.

2) Length: The length of your title tags is a very important matter. Based on research and experience, here are the average character space lengths allowed in titles before the cutoff, along with the max length

* Google: average if 66 character spaces, max of 70
* Bing: average if 65 character spaces, max of 71

The moral of the story is that you need to maximize the space available to you in the title tag – for now that’s about the first 65-70 character spaces. This means that you should try to focus on only 2-3 keyword phrases per page as that is probably all you’ll be able to fit within reason.

3) Keywords: Use your target keywords in your title tag. Before doing that, you’ll need to conduct extensive keyword research to determine which keywords are best for your site.

4) Keyword Placement & Prioritization: Keywords with more weight and ranking power should be placed at the beginning of the title. Avoid titious in your keyword usage within the title tag. Instead, try to combine your keywords to add other relevant phrases to the title tag.

5) Unique Titles: Duplicate title tags can cause the appearance of duplicate content, which may cause some pages to get stuck under a search engine’s filters – which is the opposite of what you want. This can be done by accident, negligence, or on purpose. Your title tags for ever webpage should be unique and different.

6) Avoid “Stop-Words”: Stop Words like a, about, an, as, are, but, be, or, and, and there are many others are skipped by search enginesin order to save disk space, or to speed up indexing.

7) Use of Special Symbols: Using dashes (-), the (&) symbol is okay. Even using plus signs in titles is fine. However, avoid using other symbols that may just serve to waste space such as the (©), (®), or (™)