Essential Title Tag Strategies of High Ranking WebPages in 2006

Perhaps you remember the days when cutting-edge webpage design boasted animated gifs and focused on keyword density for top search engine rankings. These days, however, standard fare often combines flash animation with a heavy incoming link campaign. But through all the changes, one element remains constant-the importance of the HTML <title> tag. This little tag was, and still is, the single most important onpage element of high ranking webpages.

Today the <title> tag remains a critical component of top scoring webpages. While it's true that inbound links can cause a webpage to rank very well even if the keyword is missing from the body of the page, you'll seldom find a page without the keyword in the <title> tag that ranks highly for a competitive search.

These days, there persists both myths and confusion about the role the title tag actually plays within the ranking formulas. So, for that reason, let's take a fresh look at what actually is helping pages score well in the year 2006.

The 7 Essential Title Tag Strategies of Today's High Ranking

Now that you know how important the <title> tag really is, you'll want to incorporate these top seven strategies to allow your titles to work at maximum power, search-engine-wise...

Length of Your Title:
When creating titles for your webpages, remember that anything more than 63 characters is mostly superfluous. Although Yahoo will display up to 112 characters and MSN up to 70, by limiting your <title> tags to Google's limit of 63 or less, you're increasing your chances you'll get your entire <title> tag displayed on all three major engines.
Word Proximity:
Search engines actually do pay attention to the distance between words for multiple keyword searches. For example, in a search for Chevrolet Corvette, a webpage <title> tag that contains these two words grouped together will typically hold a ranking advantage over another webpage with a <title>tag such as Corvette, a legend by Chevrolet.
Keyword Location:
As a general rule, the closer you place your keyword to the beginning of the <title> tag, the better the ranking advantage. However, bear in mind that we've seen fluctuations on this element from engine to engine and even from month to month. Regardless, on the whole, you can expect better results by placing your keywords first in your <title> tag.
Word Order:
Consider the search dell computers. This will generate far different results than a search for computers dell. The search engines do pay attention to the linear order of your keywords, so be sure to position them in the most likely order that real people typically use when expressing them in everyday language.
Repetitions:
Should you use the keyword more than once in the title? The answer is... it depends. First, let's talk about what not to do. Do not repeat keywords one after the other as in keyword, keyword, keyword-however, there is no denying that a few pages that score well in specific keyphrase searches do, in fact, repeat keywords. An appropriate use of repetition might look something like: ... Las Vegas - Sites and Attractions in the city of Las Vegas
Titles for Human Consumption:
There is one enduring constant of <title> tag content creation that must remain a top priority-how well the text appeals to a human. Because the <title> tag is displayed as the headline for your page in the search results, its role is to motivate people to click your link. Therefore, the <title> tag becomes the headline for your page.
What Words to Use:
By now it should be obvious that you should carefully select your best targeted keywords as your <title> tag (duh!). However, it's surprising to see how many sites are apparently unaware of this very basic and simple fact of search engine marketing and optimization. We are still seeing many, many web sites that use the same <title> tag on every single page of their site-usually the company name or domain name. And, that's a huge mistake.

Less is more... Even though most search engines will index far more of the <title> tag than what they display in the search results, we recommend that you apply this knowledge with common sense and restraint. We see no evidence that long titles are key to high rankings. On the contrary, long <title> tags actually dilute keyword density within a <title> tag. By adding additional text you reduce the influence that each keyword has in relation to the overall interpretation of what the title is actually about.

Simply put, shorter titles (i.e. less than 70 characters) are what we have found lead to the best results, ranking-wise.

Clearly, the <title> tag is an extremely important part of your SEO toolkit. It influences both your rank and your traffic. But don't try to fit everything including the kitchen sink between those two little <title> </title> tags! Simply follow our guidelines and your titles will be well-poised to play their role as one of the critically important elements that cause webpages to get ranked toward the top of the search results.