Your webpage title (that appears in the browser window) is the most important aspect of your page. Search Engines give words in your title the highest relevancy to any search. Choosing a good title is critical to your search engine rankings.
You will want to work as many keywords as possible into your title. However
your title is what is displayed in search results, so it is also important
that people are willing to click on it. If you have a string of unrelated
keywords and your page comes up first, most people will pass it by in
favor of a more descriptive link. Being first on the page isn’t going
to help, if people wont click on the link.
After a search engine robot or crawler retrieves your page and passes
it to an indexing program, it will start with the words in the title and
begin looking for those words in the text on the page. Most search engines
will flag any page where words are in the title, but not in the page. This
is why front door pages often fail miserably on search engines. If you
have a site “Bob TV sales and Service” and your doorway page does not
mention Bob, TV’s, sales or server, the page is going to be way down
in the rankings for TVs.
The length of your title, should not go over 50 characters. Most search
engines will ignore anything over 50 characters in the title (except
Altavista and Infoseek). If you are creating custom pages for each
search engine, you can use up to 80 chars for Alta and Infoseek.
It used to be that search engines worked solely on keyword density (count
of keywords in the document) – this is still true to a degree, but not
nearly as much. Formerly, you could have a page with “Bobs Television” and
a search on “bobs television” would put you first in the rankings for
a perfect match. Now days, document length is starting to get higher relevancy.
The search engines have caught onto all of the short doorway pages and
have begun giving higher credence to longer documents.
