Why Is The Title Tag Important?
I know a lot of people who think a Title Tag is an opportunity to be whimsical or “tongue-in-cheek”. They’ll have a site selling something like say, Frisbees, and their title tag (and therefore the first thing a potential customer and/or search engine sees) will be something like unrelated like “Try To Fly High With My Apple Pie In The Sky”.
This is fine if you’re not selling anything because you probably care more about entertaining the user than pointing them to a product. But since we’re selling jewelry here, it’s good to give the user a clear understanding right away of what your site is about so you can get them primed for buying things from you! Having an informative title is a good start.
Much more importantly, if you are thinking of driving visitors to your site by Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo, it’s IMPERATIVE that you have at least a halfway decent title. Like it or not, search engines robots aren’t exactly the smartest things around. Unlike a human, they can’t look at a page and see every graphic and piece of text at the same time. No, as their name suggests as robots they follow logical algorithms to search through text and thus make a guess what a page is about. And since they often wade through a document serially, the first thing they will see in your page is often the Title Tag.
Thus, if you have a Jewelry business making Italian Charm Bracelets called “Aurora Bracelets” but your title tag is “Woohoo, Watch Me Create Cool, Funky Crafts!”, search engines are give more importance to those unrelated words such as “woohoo”, “cool”, “funky” and “crafts”. So when a web surfer uses a search engine to find “Aurora Bracelets” the results may not have your site at the top of the list.
Of course, there are other things that affect your placement in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). But it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a good title tag since it’s one of the easiest ways to try improve your search engine placement.
In addition to placing importance on your Title Tag for their rankings, a search engine often uses the text in a Title Tag as the “description” of your link in their results page. So whatever you put in their will probably be what a user sees on a result page.
