Title tags are the headlines for your search engine ads. If you run a Google search on the keyword “baseball” you will see the following results:

Baseball Google Search

Baseball Google Search

The title tags are the headlines for each listing. For example, the very first listing has the title tag of “The Official Site of Major League Baseball | MLB.com Homepage.” Its a descriptive title tag that gives you an understanding of the content that you will find on that site. This is the headline for your “free” search engine ad and your best attempt to convince a searcher to visit your website.

You need to think of your title tag in the same way that you would think of a headline when you are writing an ad for Google adwords. If you just put the name of your site in the title, you are doing your site a disservice. Ideally, you want your title tag to contain a call to action. What do you want your visitor to do or what will you offer your visitor?

Moreover, you will want to customize your title tags for each unique webpage in your site. Certain software, such as Wordpress, will do this for you automatically. But if you are building your own site from scratch, you will need to make an effort to write a title tag for each unique page or product line. This is especially true if your business sells many products. For example, if you visit Amazon.com, their homepage has the following title tag: Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more. However, if I go the the page for the new iMac, I find a different title tag: “ Amazon.com: Apple iMac MB952LL/A 27-Inch Desktop.”  This is the same “headline” I will find on Google if I search for the model number for the new iMac.

Imac Title Tag

Now, if Amazon.com didn’t have a unique title tag for each product page, and you saw a generic Amazon.com title tag you would not be very inclined to click on their search listing….and it probably wouldn’t achieve a very high search ranking to begin with.

Go through your website pages and read your title tags at the top of the browser. Ask yourself the question: “Does this title tag describe the content of the webpage?” If it does not, take some time and write a new one.