Title Tag

First off let's look at the construction of the title tag. The title tag is inserted in between the <head> and </head> tag:

<title>Insert Title Here</title>

The title tag is believed to be the most important single factor, except overall page content, in search engine optimization to attain a high search engine ranking. If it is not the highest it is definetly in the top 3. For those of you who don't know what the title tag is, it is the bar (default is blue) that spans across the top of your browser above the "File - Edit - View" on the very top left hand side of your screen. The title tag has many features or tasks which most know about but also has a few that are usually disregarded or not known. These tasks are:

Acts as a referance bar for your viewers
Is the text displayed in the hyperlink when someone comes across your web site through a search engine
Is the first thing that a search engines spider will index, deaming it more important
Acts along side the description meta tag to describe what your web site has to offer
Is the title that is displayed when someone bookmarks your web site

Because the title tag is so important in search engine optimization, it is necessary that it has your most important highly relevant keywords and acts as a description of your web site. These two usually come hand in hand; in other words if you have your most important highly relevant keywords in your title it should most likely show your viewers and the search engines spiders what type of content they are going to find on your web site.

When you are choosing your title one of the important factors is to choose a title that stays within the allowed amount of characters. The amount varies depending on the specific search engine or directory. The following is a table of some of the more popular search engines and directories indicating how many characters are allowed.

Search Engine	Max Title Length
Altavista	70 Characters
Web Crawler	80 Character
Excite	80 Characters
Google	70 Character
Direct Hit	130 Characters
Open Directory	Varies
Inktomi	80 Characters
LookSmart	55 Characters
Lycos/FAST	90 Characters
Norther Light	70 Characters

One if the most common errors that I see to date is a title that simply states the company or services name. The problem with this is that unless you are a highly recognized organization it is not likely that your company or services name will be a popular keyword. While you should include your company or services name in your title tag for people that do recognize it and might search for you through it, it is much more important to have a title with your most important keywords.

In the Search Engine Optimization Overview I included an example of a good and bad title tag but here I will go more indepth. The following title is for a fictional banana company that sells bananas to markets and food chain stores all over the world:

Bad title:
Xores Banana Company

As mentioned above the first thing that makes this a bad title is the fact that it only contains the company name.

One thing that I would like to point out is the fact that the first letter of the company name is "X" which has a very low alphabetical ranking. Because of this reason if you have not chosen a company or services name yet it would be a good idea to have an alphabeticaly high ranking as some search engines and directories do take this into account. If you are already an established company or service do not worry about it.

Let's now examin all the possible keyphrases and words that come from the previous title and how many results each turned up on google:

Xores Banana Company - 0 Results
This is obviously not a very good keyword unless of coarse it was a well established company. This is an important keyphrase to contain within the title but is most likely not going to aid the web site to much.
Banana Company - 1,610 Results
Good keyword that is highly relevant a banana distribuation company
Banana - 1,600,000 Results
While I thought that this keyword would be highly irelevant to a banana distribuation company it appears not to be, but this will not take away from my experiment. As I have discussed in other articles, single word keywords generally are very competitive as is shown for this example so it would be hard to attain a high search engine ranking.

This may not seem to bad but now let's take a look at what kind of results we can get with a better title:

Good Title:
Banana production company, everything bananas - Xores Banana Company

First off before we go any further I would like to show you here how i turned a very low alphabetical priority title and turned it around to make the first letter a "B". I did this by placing the company name at the end of the title.
Now let's analyze the keywords that are in the good title:

Bananas - 596,000 Results
The plural form also generates alot of results and should obviously, in this case be used as a keyword.
Banana - 1,600,000 Results
Like I stated before this is a highly relevant keyword that generates alot of results. Because this is a highly competitive keyword you have a much better chance of attaining a high search engine ranking if you use the keyword more then once throughout your various tags as well as a high percentage (6-9%), without spamming or making it sound like you kicks out of saying bananas all the time, throughout your body. Is is always easier to attain a high search engine ranking for a more specific keyphrase with less results.
Banana production - 4,520 Results
Highly relevant, with good search results.
Banana Company - 1,610 Results
Again even though it does not turn out a ton of results it is very relevant and should definetly be used. Also because of it not having as many results as some of the others it would be a lot easier to attain a high search engine ranking for it.
Xores Banana Company - 0 Results
As stated previously the company name or service is important to have in the title tag. By placing it near the end of the title I have givin it less importance which will increase the importance of the other words.

Let's take a look back on everything that we have learnt from the previous example:

The company or service name is important as a keyword so that someone searching directly for your company or service name will easily be able to find it.
Single word keyphrases can be very competitive but if you can attain a high search engine ranking with them, can be very beneficial
Keywords near the beginning of the title have more importance
Title tags will not magically boost your rankings alone but rather should be accompanied by well written meta tags, and most of all, highly relevant content
Do not repeat a word so much that it sounds un natural because that is considered spam, which will demote your search engine ranking
While a keyphrase might contain alot of results might bring more traffic, if you can attain a high search engine ranking for a more relevant keyphrase with fewer results, but still a a fair amount, you will have alot more targeted traffic that is converted into sales, while the other keyphrase with more results could bring you alot of untargeted traffic that will not be converted into sales as there is a higher chance that they could be looking for something else, while they will more likely be looking for what you offer with the more specific keyphrase.

There is also another form of the title tag that is used in conjunction with hyperlinks. While it can not be possitive as to the importance of them in search engine optimization, they might as well be used. The tag is as follows:

<a href="Instert Link Here" title="Instert Link Title Here"></a>

What happens when you use this atribute is when someone hovers their mouse over the link for a second or two, whatever the title may be that you wrote will be shown in a small referance box. It is very similar to an images alt tag in the concept that it performs the same task, just for differant tags. Use this tag to your advantage by implementing a few keywords to describe the link.