Search Engine Optimization – Free Tips and Help – Part One – The Title Tag

search engine optimization is a widely misunderstood industry. Many webmasters, including myself, have been mislead by industry forums, and Internet “chatter”. Having tried many different approaches, starting in 1996: It is ironic that the methods I used back then, still hold true today, to a great extent.

Today’s article is on the infamous Title tag. Often overlooked, occasionally abused, but still effective.

What belongs in this Title? Quite simply: Your strongest Keyword, or Keyword Phrase – usually followed by your business name or personal name, seperated by a comma or dash.

You will notice that when you search for pages at Yahoo^(TM) or Google^(TM), you will often see the very words you used to search with, at the beginning of the result. These words are bolded, signifying relevance.

The truth is, the day and age of Meta Tags is nearly dead. What is not dead, however are the Title and Meta Description tags.

What is the best way to use the Title Tag?

Arguments will vary, but my approach follows this example: * the symbols <> have been replaced with [ and ].

[title]Widgets, John Smith[/title]

Perhaps, ultimately, only your main KeyWord, or Keyword Phrase should be present in this tag; however, it is customary to include your name, or business name. When deciding which link to follow, the end user is given more information when you include a business name.

Mathematically, the KeyWord weight of your Title tag is calculated as follows:

KeyWord Characters = K

Total Characters in Title Tag = T

Keyword Weight = K/T

In our example above, “Widgets” is the Keyword Phrase, and is a total of 7 characters(K). The total number of characters in the tag is 19(T).

K/T = 7/19 = .368 or 37%

35-50% Keyword Weight is about ideal. Repetition of Keywords in the Title used to a good technique, but I highly discourage it now. Make sure you research your Keywords well! Having problems with your dynamic (.asp .php) documents not being indexed. Make sure your code includes the ability to produce unique Title and Meta Description tags for each page. Meta Keyword tags, are, for most part useless and necessary. Title and Meta Description however are still crucial!

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