Your Web Page Title and Organic Search Results

The Importance of Your Page Title

The title of your web pages is critical to a good placement in the organic search results on Google. To get a better understanding of this, just do a variety of searches on Google and see what results come back. I have noticed that, most of the time, many of the keywords that I searched on are in the titles of the pages that are returned in the organic results.

Regarding Page Title as a "Thesis Statement"

In terms of SEO and getting Google to like a web page, consider the page title to be your thesis statement. Remember your days in school when you had to write essays that effectively prove a point? The essay format started with a thesis statement which was followed up by convincing arguments to prove your point. Your web page is the body of your essay and you need to convince Google that it really is about what your title claims it to be about. You do this by using your keywords effectively (keyword density) and by having links to pages on your site and other external sites that support the fact that the page is indeed about a specific subject.

This is not to say that the page title is everything, in fact it is less important than the actual content, but if it is a good summary of the page content, it will add to the optimization of the page. If your pages are really short and don't get into any details of the topic, then you will not get great organic search results. Having detailed page content with an appropriate page title is the best approach for SEO.

I'm not here to conjure up any negative memories from high school, but in addition to being back in the "popularity contest" in terms of PageRank, you are sort of back in English class too when you start writing content for SEO because there are formats that work and you should follow them if you want a passing grade.

Suppose you are creating a web page specifically about the benefits that your company's new content management system provides to online retailers. The page should get into the features that your CMS provides that specifically benefit online retailers, and your title should try to include some of the key phrases that you think online retailers would seach with when trying to find a CMS product. There are a lot of possible titles that you could choose for your page, one of them could be:

"Content Management System for Online Retailers. CMS Benefits and Features for eCommerce Websites"

As you learn more about search engine optimization, it becomes more clear that there really is no SEO magic, rather it is just common sense based on your understanding of the rules of SEO. So, make your web page title accurately reflect the nature of your page's content. The fact that you have a very specific page title actually is the key because, if you want a decent sized page (300-400 word minimum), you are forced to write fairly detailed information about a specific topic. The next article in this series discusses the importance of your page topics in further detail.