making web page titles SEO friendly

[crmpicco]

I have been researching making the <title> of my web pages better for the purposes of SEO. Sadly, the mistake I have made is I always have the title as: <TITLE>AyrshireMinis.com - a Mini E-Community</TITLE> and this is true for all my pages.

It seems it is better (for the purposes of SEO and making better sense, haha) to have <TITLE>AyrshireMinis.com - Galleries - a Mini E-Community</TITLE> or something similar to make the titles unique to each page?

www.ayrshireminis.com/mini/en/galleries.php

Is this the best way to do it? I've read they should be unique, but does this make much difference?

Picco

[WebJoel]

In a nutshell, yes, you want the 'highest level keyword' be the earliest. Never begin a "<title></title>" with "Welcome to my blah-blah-blah..." as "Welcome" is meaningless, as is "to" and "my"..

Think hierarchy, like H1 tags come before H2 tags, then come H3 tags, etc.. Well, "<title>" is similarly approached. If "AyrshireMinis.com" is first, it reigns highest in hierarchy, like "h1". Then next, comes "Gallery", the "h2 equivalent", and so forth. You should not need more than five words in "<title></title>". You can have more, but I think spider/'bots only concern themselves with the first word or three. After that, -they don't really index very well.

An occasional " - " or " * " might be ignored, but for pure SEO, I avoid anything except purely index-able content. -I don't want people SEARCHing for " - " or " * " to have my site come up...

And oh yeah... I should have bookmarked this site and submitted to "websites that suck", or at least made oodles of jest at it in coffeelounge, -I found a site that some ne'erdowell built for a business, and they (the web builder) inserted THEIR web page URL into the "<title></title>" tag of their client's site! Horror of horrors! To me, that is just unprofessional and rude.
A simple linkback to the web builder at the end of the site should suffice. But 'branding' yourself at the TOP of a client's page, before the client's page has even resolved & loaded... -that is just wrong, folks! :(

Now, -there could be a simpler, honest reason for this (the web builder could be same entity as business being advertised, -but I doubted it then and still do..). But assuming that the web builder is not the same entity as the client, the web builder has sacrificed one of the most important indexable opportunities for himself, the "title" tag, forsaking his client's needs...

[crmpicco]

thanks for that WebJoel, that would have been interesting to see that site you are referring to :-/

But, I have now amended all the titles on my site now - both the English and German versions. All updated @ http://www.ayrshireminis.com/

Cheers Again,
Picco

[dtm32236]

your titles should also be restricted to 64 characters

[TJ111]

Hmm, this is interesting. I've been doing "Sub Location - Main Page - Blurb", I'm going to have to switch that around.