When you are selling products or services of a particular type such as, sports' equipment, hearing aids or legal help, it is vital that your web site can be easily found by the prospective customers who reside in your vicinity. Optimising your web page titles is one of the simplest methods of achieving this objective.

What do I mean by a web page title?

A web page title is the text in the HTML code placed between <Title> and </Title> tags and is, normally, the link text which is used when your web site is displayed in the search results. This web page title can be seen by visitors to your site in the web page browser window at the top of the page.

The importance of optimised web page titles.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN use web page titles when ranking your site; so a quality web page title will improve your ability to gain high search engine rankings. This title is also the one that appears in the bold text which visitors click on to gain access to the web page they require. Therefore, your title should be short, catchy and relevant to your product/service.

Getting better local rankings.

Correctly optimised web page titles will improve your search engine rankings and attract customers living in your vicinity to your web site. Traffic will be targeted and sales increased. This is how you can improve your web page titles.

The name of your business, crucial key words and the name of your town/city should be included in the title of your homepage. So, if you supply hearing aids your web page title should state:

• Deafaid and Co - open fit hearing aid specialists in Sheffield.

If you are an established business with a well known name, list your company name first but if your company is new then it is better to list the keyword first.

•  Open fit hearing aid specialists: Deafaid and Co, Sheffield.

Visitors are usually looking for an answer to a problem (hearing difficulties) so, instead of your business name or town/city you can use the name of the wider area where your product or service is available.

• Open fit hearing aid specialists: Deafaid and Co, Sheffield, Yorkshire.

It is important to use different title tags for every page and these should be relevant to the content placed on that page. For marketing reasons the titles must have your business name plus a targeted keyword relevant to your product/service. It is from this that you will be found on search engines.

• Deafaid and Co: About our hearing aid store.
• Deafaid and Co: Buy open fit hearing aids in Sheffield.
• Deafaid and Co: Specialist hearing aids in Sheffield and Yorkshire.

Use short titles and make them extremely relevant to one keyword rather than trying to over fill your web page title with many keywords. It is much simpler for visitors to read short titles. If you wish to use different keywords to optimise your web site make sure you optimise a different page for each new keyword.

Do not use special symbols or special characters as it is often difficult to see these in search engine results.

Despite following all the above tips, optimising the web page title alone is not the only feature which dictates the ranking of your web site in the search engines. Changing your web page titles as we have explained will improve your chances and your site will be accessed by customers who live in the correct vicinity. However, to ensure that your site appears at the top of the rankings, make sure you optimise all the features that we at SmartDeCat have suggested in our Blogs and from within our software.