Everyone knows what a title tag is, but how important are they for your search engine optimization? I thought it would be fun to visit a couple blogs and a couple eCommerce sites to show some real life examples.

First here is blog post examples:

Blog Post Title: How Can I Help You In 2010? (Posted just 2 days ago.)
From DavidRisley.com

Listed #2 on Google when you search for “how can I help you in 2010″

I know.. nobody is going to search for that.. Just keep reading…

As you can see, the title of your pages is a very important aspect of optimizing your site for the search engines. In these cases David is not really looking for strong search traffic for the specific blog post titles. He is just providing a catchy title that describes what the blog post is about.

eCommerce is a completely different story when it comes to title tags and search engine optimization.

Often times your title tag will be the product name and the product name will be what the customer searches for in order to find the product that they want to BUY. I guess you can say the title tags on your eCommerce site could mean the difference in your sites traffic and ultimately your websites sales.

Most eCommerce sites have both product and category pages. I like to use higher traffic terms on category or brand pages and more specific keywords on the product pages.

Let’s dive into the example. First a category or brand page from REI.com.

The brand page for CamelBak at REI.com has the title CamelBak at REI.com.

You will find this #2 on Google for the term CamelBak. (BTW.. that get 450,000 searched per month) Not bad…

Next.. A product from REI.com

CamelBak Rogue Hydration Pack

Title of the page is CamelBak Rogue Hydration Pack at REI.com

Google results are #2 behind Amazon for this product. (BTW.. This get almost 3,000 searches per month)

Always.. and I mean always make sure your product names and title tags match and that you are using product names that people are searching for. If you are not using the exact phrase that people are searching for you will miss out on valuable traffic and sales. Use this Google Keyword Tool if you are not sure what terms people are searching for. If you feel like you want to add your brand or company name to the Title of your page then do it at the end like this. Product Name First – Company Name Second. You will most likely show up well for your brand or company name so don’t plaster it on every page before the product names.

It’s no good to be # 1 for a search term that 12 people will search for each month.

If you go down the search results to page 2 you will see stuff like this from eBags.com for the same product. They could easily jump to page 1 on Google with a simple Title change for this product.

CamelBak Rogue > Hydration Packs > Backpacks – eBags

It looks more like breadcrumbs than a proper page title. I bet if they changed the title of that page to the name of the product CamelBak Rogue Hydration Pack they would sell a few dozen more units per month without having to change anything except the page title.

Hopefully this little example will help you understand the power of the title tag. I will get more in depth in later blog posts.

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