I was asked the question recently on one of the SEO courses – How important are page titles – now they were not asking about the page heading on the page, but the text that you see in Google’s search results, which is the same text you see on the top left hand side of the browser.
Well, I took a moment and thought of a comparison – how important are eyes when driving? Thought so.
If you don’t want your website to crash and burn title tags are up there near the top of the list when optimizing for on page.
These are the reasons why:
- People click on them
- People can see them
- Google believes people more than you
Notice the pattern?
Yes, that’s right people can see the title tags, they are in the search results. The title tag is the link that people click on to visit your site. And yes Google believes people rather than you the website owner.
Website owners have been doing everything they can, mostly, to get to the top of the search engine because there is so much money when you can grab the top spot. In the far distant past search engines like Google and Yahoo! Believed website owners more.
Lets Stuff Everything
However they found to their cost that website owner would write completely irrelevant text on the pages, stuff images full of text, have title text attached to anything; basically do what they should at that time which was everything to get to the top.
As we know the rules in search change quite often. If you do not think that Google or any of the others use click tracking you’re mad and should not be allowed near a website to optimise. Click tracking will tell who and how many click on a website and how long they stay there, click on a website often enough and then hit the back button within a second or two and Google learns something about that site and its relevance to your search query. Do you think that little cookie that Google deposit on your computer every time you use them is for nothing? Big G IS watching.
Another way to figure out how important title tags are is just look at your Google Webmaster Tools account – I hope you have it set up. Go to diagnostics then click on HTML suggestions. The bottom part of the page is all about title tags, missing titles, duplicate titles, and my favorite non-informative title tags.
Google would be hard put to make it clearer – fix the title tags…
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