SEO For Newbies – To Title Or Not to Title?

The Untitled Page.

The topic of SEO (Search engine Optimization) is complex enough that there are specific job classifications for this and specific companies that hire entire platoons of specialists who claim to do nothing else.

So, in 5 minutes, you are not going to learn all of the entire nature of this business, but let me give you a very important first tip.

Do not submit your site to any services for search engine submission before ensuring that each and every page has a short 2-4 word title that includes the main keyword you wish that page to be found for.

Stating the obvious

Sounds logical or a bit laughable right? The truth is that the title tag is quite frequently forgotten by webmasters and the title given to the page by default then ends up with a title like this “untitled”. Mea culpa. I include myself in this anonymous list of webmasters. We all know better and yet slip up on this.

Nothing tells The Wondrous Google Engineers that you care less about your content than a page with no title. In the past, these pages were largely ignored or the search engines simply took a sentence or two from the top of your page and used that as the description to help you out but the page stayed named as Untitled. These pages won’t rank in the search engine results and unless your avid intention is to really hide your page, don’t do this.

As a side discussion that is of no value in this particular discussion, I have Google bombed someone else’s untitled page and changed it’s title in the serps.

So how many of us make this mistake?

A lot of people in love with one particular topic

The Google search below says that there are 12.3 million pages online with untitled in their title. The first 1000 pages are truly people talking about untitled similar to what we are doing here, I suspect many of the remaining 12 million pages are truly people who have forgotten to put a title tag on their page.

Title tags can also be used in anchor text known as the text inside links. When a mouse hover over a link gives you text that you can read, it means that usually the author was terribly diligent and used a title tag inside their anchor tag.

The Google search that returns 173 million results.

Type into the Google search box “allintitle:Untitled”

Trying hard not to be one of the sheep

Please, don’t join the 173 million, don’t forget your title meta tag.

How can you ensure that you don’t forget your title tag?

Use a free Drupal or WordPress blog. Google, Bing and Yahoo love blogs.

If using WordPress as your free blog software, use a free plugin like All-in-One-SEO to help you easily customize titles and descriptions on all your blog posts.

Have I said, Don’t forget your “title tags”? Well, let me be a little bit redundant and say, “If you use a blog, don’t forget your blog tags”. In a blog “Tags are very different from the term “title tag” that I have taken liberty with here in this article. The subjects of tags, particularly as they have been made popular by Technorati et al., is an entirely different discussion. Your title “tag” is either meta code in the header of your html or a special tag in your anchor text.

If you do go the WordPress route, enhance your visibility by using an SEO plugin. On WordPress, in the plugin/extend area just type in SEO and a plethora of plugin options will appear.

Some of the tags that I am using for this document are untitled, tags, Google search, title tags, classify, SEO, earn from home.

These tags enable Technorati and hundreds of other search engines to more easily classify any document, article or post for better search and more potential traffic to your site.

Are you already part of the 173 Million? Lets check for untitled pages on your site ?

Use this sweet bit of code in the Google search to find out

site:YourWebsite.com untitled

Change the text “YourWebsite.com” for your own domain name.

If the keyword Untitled is on your site anywhere at all, the title and description of the page it is on will show up, but so will not so obvious search results from your site that say untitled in the search result listing.