The Page Title is the phrase that shows in the blue bar at the top of your web browser when the page loads. Humans rarely read the page title when viewing your page, but search engines consider the page title when trying to determine which keywords the page should rank for.

The page title is also the bold text that shows up on a search results page when you rank in a search engine. If the page title is not well-written, visitors won't be enticed to click through to your site, so ranking well won't generate much traffic.

When writing page titles, consider that the page title should:

• Truly reflect the content of the page.
• Be unique for each page on your site, not duplicated.
• Use target keywords. Keep in mind that the earlier words in the page title are given more weight than the later words.
• Remember that keywords or phrases should be separated by a pipe character ( | ) or hyphen ( - ), like in the example below.
• Be brief. Search engines discount the importance of a given keyword in the page title more or less depending on the total number of words in the title. If a page title has 10 keywords, each word is about half as effective as if the title only had 5 keywords. This means you need to strive to eliminate words you don't want to rank for, like "and", "with", "or", etc.
• Be limited in length to about 4 keywords. 70 characters is the maximum length that will be shown in search engines.
• Be written for click-through appeal for a human visitor.

You may choose to leave your company name out of the page title, especially on interior pages, since it is a keyword you will almost always rank for anyway. If you have the space, it doesn't hurt to add it in though.

For example, if you have a page about African elephants and your company is called Columbus Expeditions, a perfect page title for that page would be, "African Elephants | Columbus Expeditions" or "African Elephants - Columbus Expeditions."