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A title tag is an HTML tag that tells your browser what to display at the top of the browser's window. In the picture above, the title tag reads "New Media Philadelphia - Nimblelight - Web Design and SEO".
Search Engines, particularly Google, give title tags a lot of weight in determining your page's search engine ranking. In Google's algorithm title tags are as important a factor as the visible text on the page and the links that point to your page. Updating your web site's title tags can be one of the simplest ways to dramatically improve your search engine rankings.
Changing the title tag requires a minor modification to the source code of a web site. In the source code of a web site, the title tag is bordered by "<title>" and "</title>" (without the quotes). The tag is typically found within the first ten lines of source code. The line of code that generated the title tag in the example picture reads:
<title>New Media Philadelphia - Nimblelight - Web Design and SEO</title>
To change the title tag of a particular page simply edit the text that appears between the "<title>" and "</title>" tags. Whatever text you place between those two tags will appear as the title of your web site.
Title tags, as a general rule, should include the web site or organization's title. For SEO purposes, it helps to include a few keywords or keyword phrases that you would like to come up for in Google. The example title tag includes the name of the organization (Nimblelight) and some keywords (New Media Philadelphia, Web Design, SEO) for which Nimblelight would be a relevant and competitive search result.
It helps if the title tag is unique to each page of your site. Ideally, the keywords used in a particular page's title tag should also be used somewhere in that page's visible text and meta data. There is a lot to choosing the best keywords to use in your title tags- you can read more about choosing the best keywords here.
Depending on how frequently Google visits your site, it can take anywhere from twenty-four hours to several months for the search engine to index the changes to your title tags.
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