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The title tag sits in the head area of your web page and is the most SEO important individual part of any web page. The title tag sets the theme for the page. It should contain the main keywords of your page. The title tag is generally the first page content the search engine spiders and robots index as they crawl your page. The title tag text is not displayed on the page itself, but on the browser window. It is the title tag that search engines show as the link to your page in their search results listings. Unique title tags on every page of your web site which accurately describe the pages will greatly enhance your search engine presence and are the basis of good SEO practice.
The title is written inside the opening and closing HTML title tags in the head area of a web page:
<title>Your page title goes here</title>
Without a title tag your page can never feature highly for your chosen keywords and search terms. Well chosen page titles can be the difference between a winning web site and obscurity. Every page on your web site should include a unique and well written page title inside the title tag. The title tag is the text shown on the browser window border at the top of the page. If the title tag is omitted the browser will display the URL of the web page instead.
Due to its importance a lot of thought is given to page titles and title tags by successful SEO experts. Please remember that your page content is what gives your pages a good search engine presence, and the title tag should reflect this content. Write a unique keyword rich but concise human reader friendly title tag on every page, without overstuffing the title with every keyword you can think of. It is not necessary to constantly repeat your web site or company name within the title tag of every page, as this is not necessarily what you are trying to rank highly for. Instead concentrate on what makes this page unique from all of the other pages on your web site. If you have taken the time to write unique content for all the pages on your site, then the title tag should flow freely from this. Read your own content, pick out the main keywords you wish to rank highly for on any particular page, and write the title tag to encompass this. Try to group your most important words at the front of the title, as the search engines often rate the importance of a given word by its position. If you have several equally important words you want at the front of the title, consider creating a new page of unique content to target each of the important key words in this subject.
According to Google's webmaster guidelines 'Use brief, but descriptive titles'. As long as your title tag gives a good description of the page content, the exact number of words used is not the most important consideration. If your title tag is too long however, the search engine will only index the front part of it. Google will actually read and display up to the first 66 characters of your title tag, including the punctuation and spaces, and so you should aim to keep your title tag within this constraint. Do not worry if some of your pages have longer titles than this, as you will not be penalised for longer titles. One last thing to note, search engines ignore many common joining or 'stop' words such as 'and', 'in', 'the', 'of' etc. when performing a search. Try to keep words like this to a minimum whilst still maintaining human reader friendly title tags.
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