Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Guide to Proper Website Header Titles

Titles are an important part of a website's strategy to encourage viewers to enter their site. More recently, however, titles have been optimized so that Google and other popular search engines can pick up the website link more easily. In this short article I will explain the importance of the title and how it should be formatted.

The title should catch the eye of potential visitors, but it should also be optimized for search engines. This is a balance that is rarely achieved, as companies often insert long and un-optimized slogans into their titles. Let's use the website of the fake company called Barnyard Depot, a barnyard manufacturer, as an example.

Let's have a look at their current title:
"The greatest barnyards on the planet... BarnyardDepot.com"

There are many problems with this title. The title should be a bit longer, and it should be filled with more keywords. I always refrain from using slogans in titles. Since you only have a limited amount of characters that can fit in a title, you want to eliminate the unnecessary words, while implementing more commonly-searched keywords.
For example, no one is going to type "planet" with barnyards, let alone "greatest barnyards". People might be looking for professionally-manufactured barnyards, or barnyards of different colours.

What about now?
"Professional Barnyard Manufacturer of Coloured Barnyards... BarnyardDepot.com"

The phrase in the title is somewhat coherent, but we need to separate "Professional Barnyard Manufacturer" with Coloured Barnyards".

Now:
Professional Barnyard Manufacturer | Coloured Barnyards | BarnyardDepot.com

The next step is to modify the "BarnyardDepot.com" ending. In my professional opinion, it is redundant to add the domain name in the title, as it already appears along with the Google results. We also want to modify the title so that we have both variations of "Barnyard", which are "Barnyard" and "Barn Yard".

Professional Barn Yard Manufacturer | Coloured Barnyards | Barnyard Depot

Ofcourse, there are more parts to Search Engine Optimization than just
the title, but the title is a very important part of SEO. I hoped you
enjoyed this tutorial.

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