By the staff of Work Media

The title tag is possibly the single most important element to optimize for your firm’s web site. The most important keyword or phrase should be the first words in the title. Try to keep the title length to a maximum of 8 to 10 words. And give every page of your site its own title with different keywords.

Also remember that the text in the title is what many potential prospects will be seeing when they view a listing for your site on a search engine results page. So while you need to write the title for search engines, you also need to keep in mind that the text needs to compel a person to click on the link to check out your web site.

Here are some examples of bad titles and good titles:

Bad Title
John J. Jones – Attorney at Law
This title is bad because it contains no targeted keywords. It is extremely unlikely that your web site will achieve a high ranking for “attorney” or “attorney at law.” This title needs to be much more targeted.

Good Title
Birmingham Personal Injury Attorney – John J. Jones
This is much better because it is much more targeted. Assuming it was optimized, this site would have a very good chance of ranking highly for searches related to Birmingham personal injury law.

Bad Title
Home – Welcome to Our Web Site
This is even worse than the other one because it doesn’t even mention anything about law. There are still a surprisingly large number of web sites with “Home” as the page title, which is absolutely useless.

Good Title
Workers Compensation Law – Howard & Fine, Attorneys – Seattle, Washington
This title contains targeted keywords and a specific location, so it clearly states what the page is about and what the relevant geographic market is.

Take the time to properly optimize the pages on your web site and you will have a much better chance at achieving high search engine rankings.