How important is a page title to search engine rankings?
May 12th, 2008Okay, since it’s Monday I thought I’d toss a softball lob SEO question: How important is the page title in improving your search engine rankings? I’ll give you a hint - the answer rhymes with “berry”.
Yup, our tests confirm what you probably already know to be true: A page with your target keyword in the title will be listed above a page without the keyword. Search engines love page titles for a number of reasons - they are descriptive, they’re near the top of your markup, and their capacity for gaming is limited.
Obviously title tags are meant to be descriptive of your page content but clearly they don’t have to be. Of course your human readers will be confused when the title bar in their browser says something like “German Shepherds make great pets” but your page is about semiconductors.
Search engines also really like title tags because they’re at the top of your page, meaning their crawlers don’t have to read the whole document just to understand what your page is about. I’ll write about this later but it’s usually best to assume search engines work in the simplest way possible - that their spiders are written to be as fast and uncomplicated as they can be. Title tags are near the top so they have priority over the stuff that comes later (your content).
Finally, title tags are technically limited in length by the W3C (the web standards org) to 64 characters. Of course this is just a guideline and some browsers may display much more in their title bars. The point is that search engines are free to truncate your title tags wherever they like meaning you need to place only the most relevant words into your page title. Search engines are also more comfortable ignoring titles over a certain length than they are, say, ignoring your content if it goes too long. The title tag is certainly important but its power is limited by nature.
Take a look at your site and make sure all your pages have unique, descriptive titles and watch your indexed pages soar!
