Web Traffic Tips: The Title of Your Homepage
Dan Blank -- Expert Business Source, 3/6/2007 6:48:00 AM
The Small Business Hub underscores the importance of the title of your homepage, and shares tips to ensure it is optimized for search engines.
“The title is one of the most important pieces of information that the search engines parse when indexing your site and is a key factor in your search engine rankings.”
The page title is the wording that is displayed on the top of your web browser when go to a particular site. It can be important in communicating to Google and other search engines, who you are, what you do, and how well they should rank you.
- Have a title.
Every page of your site should have a title.
You’d be amazed how many people don’t specify a title at all. - Don’t make it just your company name.
Unless you care about ranking for your company name more than everything else, you are much better off using it to describe what you do. Enter key words and phrases for which you want to rank highly on the search engines. - Early words matter more.
Even if you do put your company name in the title, it is better to lead with the key phrases you want to rank for. - Fight battles you have a chance of winning.
When competing for search rankings, make sure you pick key phrases that are not only relevant for your business, but also not so competitive that you don’t have any chance of ranking well for them. A good key phrase is determined by a combination of relevancy to the business, level of search volume (i.e. how many people actually search for the given phrase) and the degree of competition for the phrase.
Use tools such as these to identify the search volume for keywords: - Don’t make it too long.
Though you can supposedly have titles up to 60 characters in length, the title of your home page should probably not be near that long. - No special characters.
Do not use special characters in your title. Limit yourself to words, numbers and simple punctuation (hyphen, colon, etc.)
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