Novice web designers routinely make one crucial mistake that really hurts their website's search engine ranking. They tend to forget about the page title. I do not mean the title of the article or web page itself. I am talking about the title tag that is placed between the portion of your html code.

The page title is one of the first elements the search engines will inspect when they crawl and rank your website. This makes it essential that you include at least one of your keywords in the page title itself.

Whatever word or phrase you place into the page title is what the user will see in the title bar of their web browser. This page title is also what the search engines will use as the title of your search listing, making it crucial from a user perspective. When someone does a specific keyword search they are more likely to click on a search result that includes the specific keyword they searched for in the title listing.

If you have a multi page website you must expand your SEO efforts beyond the front page of the site. Every single page should be optimized individually with your selected keywords. This includes editing the page title on every single page that you can. This is a crucial step to successful search engine optimization.

Do not get stuck using just one keyword. It is important to consider alternative words and phrases. Even though people might be looking for the same information, the keywords and phrases they use to find this information can vary greatly. It is the unique combination of your keywords, phrases and web content that will drive targeted traffic to you. If you only focus on one phrase or word you will be ignoring a huge portion of your potential customers. In fact you will find that some of the most successful SEO campaigns are ones that focus on a variety of alternative keywords for a particular topic as opposed to the primary keyword (i.e. the keyword that is the most searched). Think about going broad instead of deep, this method can be particularly effective in highly saturated and competitive markets.

Do not waste valuable web space with your business or website name. It is not necessary to have every single page title on your website list the sites name. This is valuable space that should be used to maximize your SEO efforts. For the vast majority of website's out there including the site name in the page title of the front page is good enough. However, it is important to use your business name along with a few keywords in the page title of your sites homepage. For instance if your site was about dog grooming an example of a simple yet effective format for your homepage's page title would be: XYZ.com - All About Dog Grooming. On the other pages use keywords and phrases related to the content of those pages.