Why Page Titles are Important

One of the easiest ways to increase your web site’s search engine ranking is to write better page titles. Page titles are the second most important part of a web page (content is first), but they are the easiest thing to improve.

What is the page title?

The page title is a short description, a synopsis, of your web page. Below is an example of a page title in HTML.

<title>My Web Site - My Page</title>

Article titles, which are usually part of the page title, should be put inside the h1 element.

<h1>Page Titles and Their Uses</h1>

It should be noted that regular page titles, inside the title element, are much more valuable than the titles inside header tags (h1-h6).

So why are they important for SEO?

Search engines love page titles, mostly because they are (well, at least they should be) a description of what your web page is about. Most search bots categorize page titles as being more “valuable” than the content. A page with a title that has nothing to do with the content will always rank lower than a page with a title that describes the content well.

Another way to think of it is like this. Page titles are their own separate “content” section of a web page. The value that each keyword has in a page title is generally higher than the value of keywords in your content. This is because titles are much shorter - so the “value” per keyword is “higher”. However, you should never not put (always put) keywords in your content.

Content will always be more important for SEO because it is the reason people visit your site and link to it.

Titles and Linking

Many times when someone links to a web page they will use that page’s title as the anchor text. If you have a well written title then you greatly increase your chances of having a user click on a link to your site. In addition, when viewing search results a user is more likely to click on a link that has a good title.

Keywords

A well written title should be filled with the main keywords that describe the web page. Actually, a well written title should have phrases instead. When talking about SEO, a phrase is basically keywords and adjectives thrown together in a sentence-like form.

As you probably know, keywords are the key to SEO, especially in more recent years. For a long time search engines would use inbound links as an indicator for how good a web site is, but recently the algorithms have changed so inbound links affect your your site’s rankings much less.

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