The page title is entered into the meta tag of the code for your page.  It deserves your full and thoughtful attention.  Whether you have a new mini-site or a gradually developed, mature, professionally designed authority website, you must determine each page’s title carefully determined for several very important reasons.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The title of a page is a major piece of information that contemporary search engines use to identify the content of any web page.  In the beginning days of the Internet, search engines put an immense amount of faith in the honesty of webmasters to use keyword tags to accurately describe the topic or topics of any given page.  However, as the keyword meta tag became abused by foolish web authors, the importance of the title tag of a page grew.  Many businesses choose to spend money on this important topic by hiring professional keyword research consultants to help them choose page titles for their web pages.

Top of Browser I.D.: While some web users may not even notice it, the words used in a page’s title tag appear in the top portion of a browser.  However, many other users rely upon that information as a quick guide to the page’s major topic.

Search Listings Headline: The title of the page appears at the top of any search engine result that returns your page.  It becomes the anchor text in the result, so that, when it is clicked, the user will land on your page.  It stands out because it is underline and a different color (blue) from the description.

Text in the Browser Bookmark:  If the user chooses to bookmark the page in his or her browser, the title is the default text that is used in the bookmark, itself.  Of course, the browser will allow the user to change that text or, in some browsers, add tags for later reference, most visitors simply automatically accept the default text.

What follows are some recommendations that serve as a summary of things to consider in choosing the titles of your website pages. 

1. Choose a title for your page that is simply your primary keyword  If you consider it important to do so, you may include multiple keywords or phrases in the title, however you should rank order those, putting the most important keywords first and separating each keyphrase with a space, punctuation such as a dash followed by another space.

2. Be certain the chosen title stands out to everyone who has searched for your relevant keyword when your listing makes an appearance in the search engine’s results.

3. Make certain that the page title is brief by also a complete accurate description of the page.  Thus, it will be recognizable and useful to the user who sees it listed among the list of bookmarks in her or his browser.

4. Don’t use the word “home” as your complete title of your home page.  Unless the page is about the concept of home or a house, calling a page “home” provides no useful information to the search robots or to your site’s visitors knowledge of what your site or this page is really about.  You can, of course, use that word as part of a slightly longer title, such as “Home of Best Widgets.”

5. You should experiment with changing your title every once in a while to see if you achieve better search engine results, in the same way that you would run tests on all of the major variables on your website.