Search Engine Optimization - Changing Your Home Page Title Tag

You can simply tweak the title of your home page and your site may show up higher in the search engine ranks with that tweak alone.

The title is usually the headline that displays on the major search results page (the bold hyperlinked part) and is actually the hidden code within your page. This code is usually accessed via your text or WYSIWYG editor between the "head" opening and closing tags - it is hidden within the html (or xhtml). The more descriptive and relevant your title is to your customers, the more likely it will show up higher in the results and the more likely it will be clicked on.

I am very surprised at how many sites still have "home page" or their company name as the title - and sometimes with no other key words what so ever. That's fine if you don't need to sell to new customers and everyone knows your company name, but I'll bet they don't (unless you are Coca-Cola or Nike). Many search engine marketers believe that the title tag is the most important element with regard to search engine optimization (a.k.a: getting traffic to your site). It is very important to have titles that have relevant keywords to your product or service offerings -that is how they search for you!

Title tag scenarios

Keep in mind that the actual position of your page within Google's search results can be determined by a combination of 100 variables (key word rich content, links, w3c complaint code, hyperlinked keywords, page rank etc.), let's just assume that you have three identical sites and each has page titles like this:

Sample #1 - Title = "Home Page"
Sample #2 - Title = "Vancouver Thai Food Restaurant and Home Delivery - Sami's"
Sample #3 - Title = "Sami's Restaurant Canada"

I would bet you that Sample #2 is going to receive the most amount of traffic to its website than the others with regards to reservations, home delivery and Thai food in Vancouver. The page will most likely be higher up in the search results and customers will most likely click on the link because it's more relevant to them.

Defining key words for your page titles
You can start by looking at competition. Review how they term their keywords in their title tags(by right clicking and view source, it should be close to the top). You can also use a keyword generator tool (like Wordtracker or Google Keyword tool), they will give you suggestions. You may be able to guess yourself or even better- ask your customers how they search on Google for your service or product - it's a simple as that!

Interested in learning more? A really good site that can help you with search engine optimization (driving traffic to your site) is http://searchenginewatch.com/

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know!)

If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!