If you only do one thing to your website to help optimize it for search engines, that one thing should be giving your site a descriptive, keyword rich title tag. The title tag is the title that displays in the upper left hand corner of the browser when the page loads. It acts as the website’s name and therefore should be accurate, descriptive and include the keywords you are optimizing your site for.

You don’t want to overdo the keywords. Google only reads the first 156 characters of your site’s title tag so you have to choose your words wisely. Just stuffing it full of keywords only serves to hurt, not help you. Aaron Wall writes on using keywords in the title tag: “If it is overdone it can actually suppress a site’s rankings, but if the site is well mixed and the titles look more like descriptive newspaper titles than overt SEO it helps a lot. Plus many people link at documents by their official names, and thus the title acts as anchor text for viral content.”

When someone finds your site in the search engine results the title of your site is shown in bold. That is the first thing the searcher’s eye is drawn to, so you want that title to represent what your site has to offer and if possible you want them to see the keyword they were searching for as well. A well written title tag can optimize your site to help Google and other search engines rank you well for the keywords you are using on your site and it can help draw visitors to your site by telling them that your site offers them exactly what they are looking for. Many people neglect the title tag on their site, by making yours descriptive and keyword rich you will automatically be giving yourself a big advantage over those that don’t.

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