The Importance of Title Tags to E-Commerce

Title Tags are sometimes overlooked, or even completely ignored, by webmasters because they do not understand them, or exactly how important they are. But when you consider that they represent a very short piece of text (just 70 characters including spaces embedded in the HTML code), which then defines an entire web page to the world, their importance becomes a little more apparent.

In brief, the Title Tag text that is inserted into the HTML code displays as the underlined blue link in search engine results pages, (SERPs), or when a web page is 'shared' on Facebook and other social networking sites. The latter is very important because since the advent of Google+ and the +1 equivalent of a 'like' button, social media recommendations are also ranked by Google.

Having the right Title Tags is crucial to any website, but particularly so to E-Commerce sites, because they give the search engine bots, as well as potential customers, a synopsis of every separate web page (i.e. every different product or service) and you, as webmaster, one of the biggest opportunities to direct traffic to specific pages.

This means that E-commerce website designers have got to pay serious attention to Title Tags and realise there importance to website and those of you who are using a website designer should make sure that they are doing these properly.

Title Tags are actually a requirement for HTML documents, so it makes sense to use them to their best advantage. Interestingly, if you care to check the source code for a random selection of SME websites, you will reveal huge numbers that only use their company name or domain name in their tags and they magnify the mistake by replicating them on every page.

The trick is to think not just keywords but search phrases. For example, if you have an e-commerce site that has a number of products or services, concentrate on just one. Then try putting yourself in the searcher's position and think of some words or phrases you would enter to try and find that particular item online.

When people are searching online they tend to be remarkably impatient and will scan very quickly through search results for the one that is most relevant to them. The word relevant is the key, if you are seeking local trade. Include a location in your Title Tags. If you are global, find something relevant but attention-seeking to make you stand out in the crowd.

Avoid tags that are literally a list of individual keywords. SERP results from a single word tend to be far too generic for most searchers and they will back off and try a more specific search. Worse still, they could put your site on a result page with one of the many spammy sites that are everywhere. To avoid your tag text appearing like spam in the SERPs, use a separator (e.g. a colon: or pipe |) between each individual entry.

So there it is webmasters, do not miss out on a huge opportunity to have naturally searched, organic traffic arriving on your pages, get over any phobias you may have about Title Tags (or for that matter any part of SEO that involves looking at HTML source code) and start defining those 70 characters for every page.