No, they are a not the ones hanging on that new suit you hated to buy for your cousin's wedding.
They are the words that appear, on the very top bar of your web browser, for every page on the internet that you visit.
They are extremely important to gaining strong search engine results page (SERPs) results for your blog's most important keywords.
Mainly, I have been focussing your attention on your on page copy and developing your incoming link popularity. Those are still very important and should never be neglected.
Some search engine experts claim title tags are equal in importance to content and incoming links. Title tags are certainly an added booster shot, for your blog's placements, in the search results.
What are title tags anyway?
They are the name of your blog, as appears on the clickable link in the search results. If your blog title is in your title tag, that is what will appear in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma, AOL, etc.
What we want to do here, is to make some improvements on what appears on the top of your browser bar.
I use the blog title Blog Business World as my title tag for this blog. It covers the main search terms. I may make some changes to reflect some other search results that found my blog.
On my roller derby blog, the title tag reads "Roller derby news and commentary - Wayne's Derby World".
It reflects the fact that the most important keyword phrase, by far, is "roller derby". Note that the keyword phrase appears at the front of the title tag.
I left the blog title up there, as many people search for my roller derby blog, by its title. It's becoming a bit of a brand name in roller derby circles.
To find your title tags in your blog template, they are located in the HEAD section like this:
HEAD>
<>ABC Blog Title
HEAD
Note: The word "TITLE" should appear inside the <> and . The word HEAD should be enclosed in to close all of the tags. Be sure to properly close your title tags in correct html. Blogger won't publish let me publish them directly, as an example.
The title tags are generally followed, in the HEAD section, by your META description and META keywords. Different blog templates and web page building software will place them in slightly different spots. Don't worry about that.
What is important is what is written in the title tags.
Let's say your title tag reads:
<>ABC Blog Title
Is that how people find your blog in a search. Check your referrer logs for the most numerous search terms. We are talking about the top two or three keywords only here.
For example, you are a political blogger. That is certainly a competitive area. There are many political blogs, publications, websites, everything else related to politics on the internet.
All of them are competing with your blog to appear on Page One of the SERPs.
In our example, we are going to use the example of the Iraq War. That keyword combination will generate 7 million results on Google.
7 million!
Your blog, with ABC Blog in the title tag is not going to be found in the first 100 results pages, if at all.
What you can do, is change your title tag to this option:
<>Iraq War News - ABC Blog Title
You may have a specific area of the Iraq War that you study more carefully.
Your title tag would then become"
<>Iraq War News - hostages - ABC Blog Title
Note that your specialty is now included.
Always use hyphens as the search engines see them as blank spaces. They do NOT see under_scores that way. The search engines view under_score words as one word: underscore.
Don't use all capital letters in your title tags either. It doesn't look attractive, appears to be shouting, and the search engines consider it to be "spammy". Simply write the words as you would normally see them written in a sentence.
By making changes in your title tags, and adding your very most important keywords to the front, you will rise in the search engines.
It won't be over night. It might take a couple of weeks to a month, but the improvement will happen.
Think title tags and move on up!
