Page <title> & how it helps increase search engine visibility
This is part 3 of 8 of my mini series on SEO. Currently, people use search engines the most to discover websites that contain the most relevant content that they’re looking for. And the ‘Search’ function is also the most used ways site visitors navigate around individual websites. So what is surprising is that page titles are in fact one of the main ‘tools’ to attract new visitors from search engine results and help your site visitors find the exact pages that they need.
The page <title> tag is an HTML code and is almost always used as the clickable headline for listings on search engine result pages (SERPs). It’s sometimes called ‘microcontent’ as search engines typically only show the first 66 characters or so of it. Yet, along with the META Description content, it’s one of key factors that visitors use when deciding whether to click it or not…!
What does a page title look like?
Using Google as an example, the word ‘Google’ at the top is a page title i.e. the wording that appears at the very top of your browser when you’re viewing a website:
But what is important is how you display them on subsequent pages. Remember this, your site or company name is not important to the site visitor – only its content is! So subsequent page titles should first show what the page content is then your site/company name… not the other way around. Again if we use Google as an example, after I enter the search term ‘milk a chicken’, see how the page title changes to ‘milk a chicken – Google Search’
(NOTE: Page titles are also used as the default entry in the Favorites when users bookmark a site. For your homepage only, begin with your/company name, followed by a brief description of the site. Don’t start with words like “The” or “Welcome to” unless you want to be alphabetized under “T” or “W.”)
For all other pages, start the <title> with a few of the most salient information-carrying words that describe the specifics of what users will find on that page – but don’t spam it! Since the page title is used as the window title in the browser, it’s also used as the label for that window in the taskbar, meaning that advanced users will move between multiple windows under the guidance of the first one or two words of each page title. So if all your page titles start with the same words, you’ll reduce usability for your ‘multi-windowing’ users.
If you’re working in a programme like Dreamweaver, then you can set the Page Title by including the following between the <head> </head> section of code:
<title>Enter the title of your page here</title>
But if your using wordpress, for example, then by installing the Platinum SEO plugin you’ll be able to control not only the page title but other key areas on a post by post basis.
That’s it for today… come back tomorrow for part 4 of ‘SEO: No animals were harmed in creating this website’ and I’ll go through META Description 
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Nice blog post. You will “score” bonus points with Google if you get your title linked to – NB! with the title name being the link, NOT the click here. If you get good external links – brilliant, otherwise internal links also help.