Do you judge a book by its cover? What about its title? A good title can certainly help you get a feel for the content. In the same way, having good titles for your web pages is very beneficial for helping visitors get to the right content.
One of the biggest reasons to have good, meaningful titles, is it helps the search engines determine what your site is all about. If the titles describe the content of the page, it helps reinforce the key word / key phrase idea that is absolutely crucial to getting ranked well in the search engines.
One of the worst titles you could possibly have for a page on your site is “Welcome to <your business name here>”. A couple of reasons why this is bad. 1) it tells the search engines nothing about what content will be found on the page. 2) if the page title shows up in the search results it provides no context for the searcher to determine if your page has the right information. 3) OK, more than a couple of reasons – Should a visitor actually bookmark your page, their bookmarks or favorites are likely to read “Welcome to” and then run out of room. The likelihood of that bookmark ever enticing them to return to your site is very low.
So what kinds of titles are good? If you own a hair salon and have three pages on your site, the main page, a contact page and a list of services, you might determine that these titles both accurately represent your business and contain the key phrases your customers search for: Main Page –“Hair Styling, Hair Cuts, Hair Care Products”, Contact Page – “Contact Your Hair Stylist or Barber”, and Services Page – “Haircuts, Hair Styling, Hair Coloring: All Your Hair Needs” would be pretty good choices.
Did you notice what was missing? That’s right the name of the salon doesn’t appear at all in the titles. Why? If you’re trying to get more or new customers, they aren’t likely to search for your business name but for generic phrases related to hair.
Need more help with the titles for your web site? Call EduCyber at 720-275-4646.