How important is the page title?

KidPub is built on the Drupal platform. I hadn't given a lot of thought to page titles and how they are used in marketing, but I now think that they are incredibly important.

The text in the title tag of a page are what shows up at the top of your Google search result. Drupal out-of-the-box doesn't do a very good job of filling this in, especially if you are using the default naming convention for posts. Heat maps of the Google search results pages show that the eye gravitates to the upper left of the page, and concentrates on the top line of each result. The title of your page may be the only thing that a potential visitor sees on Google.

Let me repeat that: The title of your page may be the only thing that a potential visitor sees on Google.

What you don't want here is some random text that Drupal or Wordpress or your staff web designer has inserted into the title tag. The title should tell the Google search user, in seven or eight words, what the site is about. When I took a hard look at the way KidPub was showing up in search results, I found everything on that first line from 'I hate Twilight' to 'Advice on avoiding homework' to 'Welcome!'. Not very marketing-friendly.

I created a ten-word description of what KidPub is and used the Drupal Nodewords module to insert this phrase into all title tags. What you see now in a Google search result is:

KidPub : Publisher of Stories, Books, Poetry For Kids, By Kids

This tells the reader exactly what we do, and it includes keywords that generate significant Google search traffic. KidPub is the first result returned for a search on 'kids publisher', for example, and also for 'stories by kids'. There's no 'and' between Books and Poetry because it causes the phrase to exceed the character limit used by Google, which means the phrase ends abruptly with a ...

Take some time to look at your page the way the Google web crawler sees it. Your title tags are a significant marketing tool and shouldn't be ignored.