Optimize This Page Title - Page Titles Make You a Star
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Page titles get seen by the search engines first and the searchers second. Write a relevant page title and you have a much better chance of showing up for the right keywords in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Think of it as receiving a reward for helping the search engines figure out how to classify your page.
The searchers will see your page title after the search engines – but it’s often the first thing they will see about your site. They will probably choose whether or not to follow the link to your site based on your page title. So you have to please both a bot and a real human being. That’s reason enough to spend extra time on your title.
Searchers will bookmark your site if they like what they see. What’s the default text used for a bookmark? You guessed it: the page title. I admit, when I bookmark a page, I’ll change the text; I usually shorten it or make it more descriptive (or both). If you don’t force your visitors to take this extra step, you’ll put a smile on their faces. And consider this: if a visitor doesn’t change the bookmark and it’s not descriptive enough, he may forget why he bookmarked your site in the first place. That makes the bookmark kind of useless to both of you.
When someone is trying to find a site that they visited and liked but didn’t bookmark, they’re likely to check their browser history. Guess how web pages show up in a browser’s history? Give yourself a gold star if you said page titles. Guess what happens if your page title isn’t descriptive? It won’t stand out in a browser history list, and you’ll lose a return visit.
Does your site feature an RSS generator? If so, it probably turns your page titles into headlines. Those headlines entice subscribers to your feed to come visit your site and read the entire article. In other words, as I’ve been saying for the past three paragraphs, good page titles not only encourage first-time visitors to check you out; they also help you get repeat visits.
Finally, there’s the matter of links. Here I am talking about an on-page optimization factor, and now I’m dragging in links?! But that’s an off-page optimization issue, right? Well, not exactly. Sometimes on-page and off-page factors feed each other, and this is one example of that. As you saw when I mentioned bookmarks and browser history lists, when there’s a link involving a web page, the browser defaults to the page title.
So do a lot of people who link to your page. So when Jazzy Judy writes her blog entry about your music store and its incredible selection of jazz recordings going all the way back to George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong, her anchor text will be your page title. Anchor text is widely believed to play a prominent role in how Google decides whether a page is relevant for particular keywords.
Next: Great Page Titles, Short and Sweet >>
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