What is displayed in the title bar of the web browser when a web page from your website is accessed?

Is it index.html?

Not very yummy for the search engines.

The key point behind onpage optimization is making a web page ready to be consumed by a search engine. Search engines want to know what a web page is about. One element they consider is the page title. Page titles like "index.html" or "My Page" tell a search engine absolutely nothing about the web page.

Consider the following page title:

Family Home Disaster Preparedness Kit

This page title tells the search engines what this page is about. What does it matter?

First, having good page titles on all the pages of a website is good customer service. Readers will be able to easily know what kind of content exists on the page simply by reading the title.

Second, the page title is the first stop search engines make in determining what the page is about.

The example above tells the search engine a lot about the page. The engines will not only look at those five words in total, but combinations of those words as well.

In short, the words to use in the page title are KEYWORDS. These keywords not only describe the content of the page, but they are also terms that users are using in search engines to find said content.

In writing page titles combine these two elements together. Do keyword analysis to determine what keywords people use to search for the kind of content that exists on the page. Wed this analysis with a description of the actual content. Most of the time these two meld well.

Taking the step to improve the page titles on web pages is an excellent way to begin to optimize a website!