Page title is by far the most important element in your page. We as humans may not read the html page title, we may look at images or body tag and try to scan the document fast. The way humans build knowledge is different than they way search engines do, and this is why you may not agree with me about title tag importance for search engine optimization. If I were to give weights to the importance of the title tag versus all other on page factors, I would say it is about 60-70%. You need to select good titles for your web site pages.
What is a good title? Evey title you select may increase or decrease your web page rank in SERP for many keywords. But, there are few recommendations that you may consider:
- Use specific titles, do not use generic keywords. For example, if you create a new blog about cars, and you write a page with a title “cars”, you will not get rank of 100000, since you choose very generic title and millions of people wrote about it before many years and they already gained many of back links. However, if you choose title like “car trunk maintenance”, you may rank since you have much more specific keywords. However, if you have a site that has numerous number of back links, you may consider targeting general keywords, but it is not going to be easy. I will post later about general vs specific keywords, which also corresponds to high traffic versus low traffic keywords.
- Your entire site must not have duplicate titles. Every page must have its own title, meta tags, headers, and body. Search engines hate duplicate content whether inside your site or whether outside your site.
- Before you select your title, do keyword research. You may consider visiting overture and do few searches. For keyword like “cars”, overture says that more than 3 millions searches were performed for it last month. Overture also gives you many related keywords that you may consider in your site. FYI, overture gets information from Yahoo, Google does not make this data available, but the search giant may get double these numbers.
- Your title must be related to your page header (usually inside h1 field) and content. It will not make any sense for search engine if your page title is “car maintenance” and your header is “watermelon”.
I want to end this post by saying that it is really very hard to predict the success of a specific title. Specially when your site is dynamically generated and most your page have same pattern for title like product pages in shopping cart site. You always need to do some keyword research and measure keywords competitiveness (i will write later about measuring keywords competitiveness in details) and then you need to try your titles. Remember, you need to let search engines crawl your site fully once you change your titles, give it one or two months and then judge if the titles were good or bad, do not judge fast.