Adding titles to web pages is a simple process that takes only a few seconds. A page title helps human internet users find what they are looking for, as well as allowing search engines to properly index a site. Since titling a page is so simple and so important, it is surprising that so many webmasters neglect to do so. Pages without titles display as “Untitled Document.” A quick search on Google reveals that there are 83 million such pages. Since no one actually does a search for “Untitled Document” when looking for real information, we can be sure these 83 million pages get little or no traffic from search engines.



While adding a title to a page before uploading it to the net is easy, deciding on a proper title requires a little careful consideration and research. Your page title should be short, descriptive of what your page has to offer, and contain a search term that someone might type into a search engine.

For example, let's say you are designing a page for a small wedding planning company in Chicago. The company has a clever name like “Bridal Inspirations.” So you should make that the title of the website, right? Wrong. You have to stop thinking about how you would like to present yourself, and instead put yourselves in the shoes a potential customer and consider how they might find your site. There might be a small number of people who are recommended by friends who say “Bridal Inspirations did my wedding and they were fabulous” and then go on to type “Bridal Inspirations” into a search engine. You can easily catch these few searches by putting “Copyright (c) Bridal Inspirations” at the bottom of the page, within the last 25 words or so of text. However, since most people still get married only once, very few will know any wedding planners by name. Think of what they might type into a search engine. “Wedding planner” will return too many results. Unlike online shops that ship orders nationwide or worldwide, the wedding planning industry is localized. Therefore a user is likely to do a search for “Chicago Area Wedding Planners.” That is what you want to use for the title of your page. You could also go with “Bridal Inspirations: Chicago Area Wedding Planners.” However, with each word your add to your page title, you are diluting the effectiveness of the keywords included in your title, so shorter is better.

Of course you also want to build up name recognition for the company. You can do this by designing a header graphic with “Bridal Inspirations” written out in a nice font. In the “alt image” tag of this header, use “Chicago area wedding planners image”. Adding “image” to the end of the tag prevent search engines from marking your image tags as spam and ignoring them. It is also a good idea to start off the text of your page with a sentence that begins with your title. In this example, we could use “Chicago area wedding planners Bridal Inspirations will take care of every aspect of your important day...” This opening sentence contains a popular search term, the company's name, and sound natural.

Here are some other page titles you want to avoid:

“Welcome to our page!” - This sounds friendly, but does nothing to describe your page. If you want to include this as an intro to your page, make it a header image, not a title.

“Pete's Online Store” - Who is Pete? What does his sell? A much better title would be: “Golf Clubs Online” or whatever it is the shop is offering.

As you can see, taking a little time to carefully select a title will help both human visitors and search engines find your site.