<title>Title Goes Here</title>



Always use lowercase in your code. Capitalization is almost never needed, and in the future, as HTML changes to XHTML and XML, capitalization will cripple your pages. Get it right now instead. Lowercase HTML code is W3C compliant.

Simply put ... the title of your web page. NOT your website, and NOT your domain name and NOT your slogan but the title of the particular web page and make it keyword rich.

Now as we progress through our lessons you will find that I tell you to do things that seem to go in opposite directions. I do this on purpose. I'll explain. Basically, if I was to tell you how to construct a title tag, I'd tell you to make it about 12 words, no three letter words (unless it happens to be a keyword). Three letter words are basically stop words like, the, and, but, was, did etc., including two letter words. These basically do not get indexed. Basically I said. You'll find in optimization that there are no cast in stone rules and what works today won't work tomorrow. SEO just isn't an exact science.

If SEO was an exact science we would have a certain number of words on a page, a certain number of keywords, a certain number of keywords in the title, etc., etc. ... this is just not the case. Nor is it at all practical. The engines take many, many things into consideration when they list your website in their index. Some of these things will change the value of something else that you are rated on. Consequently, every single web page is going to be ranked differently than every other. There is no simple recipe to success. As a for instance, if two sites have the exact same number of words on the page, and the exact same keyword density, exactly same use of all other SEO tactics except that one has a ton of inbound links with really good quality keywords for anchor text and the other doesn't ... well, the site with all the inbound links will be listed higher. You'll find out more about inbound links later in this course. For now think of an inbound link to your site as a vote for you, and the anchor text used as the definition of your site. Obviously you don't want that link to say Click Here.

Well, back to me sending you in opposite directions ... that is just the way it is. I optimize for the future as well as for what I know should work well today. So, back to the Title tag, as you create your pages make some pages with the 12 words I normally suggest, and make some with more, let's say 15 words, and some with less, lets even try only three words (be sure it's a nice keyword phrase).

The reason I do this is that what works today, may not work tomorrow. That means something else will work tomorrow. Let's be prepared for that! Let's make lots and lots of pages, targeting lots and lots of keywords, and let's have them address different algorithms too! Then we'll be covering all the bases. This is my method of optimization. What comforts me about this is I will often see an algorithm change and my pages that were languishing there in the Top-10 suddenly disappear. If I have covered all the bases, some other pages of mine should rise into the Top-10. You lose some, you gain some. When you see other pages rise in the ranks, you can analyze them and see just what density and all you used on them, and now you have insight into the algorithm change.

I really hope you read that. Wake up if you didn't, let me repeat it here:

You lose some, you gain some. When you see other pages rise in the ranks, you can analyze them and see just what density and all you used on them, and now you have insight into the algorithm change.

Ideally, we'll have three or four pages targeting one specific keyword or keyphrase. Each of these pages will address differing SEO opinions. In the long run we will have insurance against algorithm changes.

Use your keywords in your Title tag but make it readable by a human being, at least to the point it is readable, even if it sort of sounds like broken English. A while back one of the programmers I work with created a little script where you could input your keywords as a list and it would spit out meta tags and the title tag. Really cool. The title tag however was really unreadable. It was a string of keywords. Good for the engines, but not good for a person to read. Also, as I will point out over and over, in optimization, anything that can be misconstrued as SPAMMY OR some method or tactic to garner better positioning in the SERPs, will get you into hot water when it is discovered. Also you have humans reading and you want their attention. Write a good title and description tag to get their attention. Also, as mentioned elsewhere as well, lately Google has been using the description tag in the search results.

Normally I would not want to see my keyword in the Title tag more than twice. I usually only use it once. But experiment with this also and use it up to three times if you have 15 or so words in the title.

I hope you are getting my point here. The idea is to have lots of pages online. Google in particular loves big websites. Throughout these pages use different numbers of keywords in all your tags. Spread it out. Keep it simple. Don't duplicate content though, just to get more pages. Keep them unique.