The <head> contains several important fields of importance to your SEO. The one we are speaking about today is the <title>.
The title will appear at the top left of the browser -- typically next to the program icon. In Microsoft Windows that is the blue bar at the top of program windows. Most users never see this area of the screen. They are busy concentrating on the content found in the body of the page.
In the image above, you can see the at the top left the title of the web page I have open at the moment (my Blogger Create Post window). Then near the bottom of the graphic you can see two tabs. One of the tabs (to the left) is for this same page. The tab next to it is my Blogger Dashboard. This is how it looks in Firefox 3.6 on WinXP. The details will vary in different browsers -- but the general idea should remain the same.
Another place the title will appear is on toolbar icons typically found at the bottom of the screen when you have multiple programs running -- provided you are using a standard windows installation. This will look different in Mac and Linux. But still, in a multi-tasking environment the title of your web page will be used in some fashion to label the icon leading back to the application showing your page.
For SEO purposes the most important place that your title will appear is in search results. Here is the big duh of SEO. Whenever a user does a search engine search the results include your title.
If you study the above image a little, you can see that in google's search results the title is used for the link text, and is the top of the listing.
I ask you: does the search results page contain just one result or many? It contains many of course. So when your page appears in the search engine results you are competing with every other result appearing on the same page. Hence, your title needs to give the user enough information so that he or she can determine whether or not your page is a better match for the content they are looking for.
Please note, (turn up your attention) I did not say that your title needs to help attract the user to your web page. Rather, I said your title needs to help the user determine if your pages is the one they are looking for.
Herein lies a major difference in attitude and headset. One headset is: "I am doing my best to trick, hoodwink, and generally bamboozle readers into coming to my pages." Another headset is: "I have content that will be of interest to the right audience -- if only they can find it -- hence I need to do my best to quickly and efficiently let that audience know what I have so they can decide if they wish to visit my pages."
Very different approaches. Even if you are desperate for traffic -- I mean really, really desperate for the traffic -- you still need to use the second approach.
The true secret to SEO is to provide good content, then manipulate things such as title so that people can quickly and efficiently find your content -- provided it is what they are looking for.
So given all of the above, what is the general rule for your titles?
Every page on your website needs a unique and accurate title.
