In this three part series I will describe the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is what is usually included in a website design that claims to be “Search Engine Friendly”. Many website designers will use this term to give the impression that their websites will be indexed and ranked highly by search engines and may not even need SEO in order to rank on search engines such as Google or Yahoo. While these “Search Engine Friendly” websites may indeed be indexed by search engines, they most likely will not rank highly as there are many other factors involved in order to increase search engine ranking. Were this a group of articles on Advanced SEO, this may in fact be a 150 part series which would change every month as search engines update their algorithms.

Nonetheless these three steps are indeed important to SEO, even though they have been used and abused in the past. In today’s post I will focus on the first part of the three parts listed below, the Title Tag. Please note that the three “Tags” discussed below appear withing the coding of the website, specifically in the head section.

1. Title Tag
2. META Description Tag
3. META Keyword Tag

Firstly, I should point out that there is an advanced SEO prerequisite to writing the Title Tag. For basic SEO this is not an issue, but for advanced SEO, the first step would be to do keyword research to discover which keyword will bring in the most traffic and which of those keywords will result in the most visibility and create the most conversions. This is far from an easy process, when done correctly, and may take up to a week to complete for an average sized website. 

We will not be covering keyword research in this article, but instead focus on what the Title Tag will do for you and how it should be used. There are four main benefits of the Title Tag:

1. Visual representation for the visitor
2. Website page relevancy for the search engine
3. Keyword Relevancy for the search engine
4. First line description for a search engine results listing

When you open a website in your browser of choice, the Title Tag is what appears in the top left corner of your browser, describing what that page is about. Every page on a website should have a different Title Tag to describe the content in basic form. Lets look at this example of the Boat Rental website page at Sea Lagoon:

Title Tag Example - Sea Lagoon Website

In this example you can see that the Title Tag appears in the top left hand corner of the browser window as well as in the tab on the tabular layout. This is one use of the Title Tag, for visual representation for the visitor, however it is also used for several other purposes.

The Title Tag should be an accurate representation of what the website page is about. This is used by search engines to determine if the Title Tag is an accurate ‘title’ in respect to the other content on the page. 

Title Tag Relevancy - Sea Lagoon Boat Rental Page

On the Sea Lagoon website page ‘Boat Rental’, we can firstly see that the Title Tag is an accurate description of the website page ‘Boat Rental’. The menu item is labelled “Boat Rental”, the file name is called “Hong-Kong-Boat-Rental” and the header tag of the content is labelled “Hong Kong Boat Rental”.

Search Engines will further look at the keywords that are used in the Title Tag to determine what exactly the page may be portraying and what keywords to link this page with when someone searches on specific keywords or keyword phrases on a search engine. In this example, the following keywords are relevant:

1. Hong Kong
2. Boat
3. Boat Rental
4. Hong Kong Boat Rental
5. Sea Lagoon

These keywords and keyword phrases are all relevant as they may be typed into a search engine by a user searching for boat rental in Hong Kong. To determine specifically which keyword is the most relevant a search engine may further look at the keyword density of these keywords on this website page. In this case the keyword “Boat Rental” would be the most relevant keyword phrase with a keyword density of 4.06%. To read more about keyword density visit our article on “Is Keyword Density Important?” or “Content is King with Content Optimization“.

The last role for the Title Tag is when it is used in search engine results. Let’s take Google search results as an example. When we type the phrase “Boat Rental” into Google, the following search engine results are returned:

Title Tag Example - Google Results Listings

As you can see in this example, the keyword phrase “Hong Kong Boat Rental” rates the boat rental page on the Sea Lagoon website as being the most relevant to this query. Also note that the Title Tag appears in the first line of the search listing and also note that it has bold formatting applied for added effect. Since the keyword phrase is exactly the same as that typed in by the user, Google values this website page higher, and adds bold formatting to the exact keyword phrase that appears for this listing. You can also see that the file name of the page also has bold formatting applied, adding extra emphasis to the listing.

That’s it for the Title Tag – stay tuned for the next installment, next week on Basic Search Engine Optimization – META Description Tag.