The title of a page as it is entered in the meta tag in the source code of your web page merits your most thoughtful consideration.  Regardless of whether you own a well built small website or a slowly developed, mature authority site, the title for each page needs to be carefully decided upon for several important reasons.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The title of a page is a critical piece of data that contemporary search engines use to identify the content of any page.  In the earliest days of the Internet, search engines put an immense amount of faith in the honesty of webmasters to use keyword tags to accurately describe the topic or topics of any given page.  However, as the keyword meta tag became abused by cheating web authors, the importance of the title tag of a page grew.  Many businesses choose to spend money on this important topic by hiring professional keyword consultants to help them choose page titles for their web pages.

I.D. at Top of Browser: The word or words used in the title tag show up in the uppermost region of the browser window.  Although some web visitors do not even notice the word or words used in the title, other visitors rely upon that as a short-hand reference to immediately determine the topic of that page.

Search Listings Headline: At the top of any individual listing in a search engine query is the page title, taken directly from the title tag.  It becomes the anchor text in the result, so that, when it is clicked, the user will land on your page.  It is blue and underlined so that it is the most noticeable part of your coveted listing.

Text in the Browser Bookmark: Although the visitor can elect to change the text, the title tag supplies the default text for any bookmark for a page that the user enters into her or his browser.

Here are a few suggestions to help you as you decide upon appropriate titles for each of your site’s pages 

1. Choose a title for your page that is simply your primary keyword or phrase  If you consider it important to do so, you may include multiple keywords in the title, however you should rank order those, putting the most important keywords first and separating each keyphrase with a space, punctuation such as a dash followed by another space.

2. Be certain the chosen title stands out to everyone who has searched for your keyword when your listing makes an appearance in the search engine’s results.

3. Assure that the title is simultaneously as brief as possible and a truly accurate description so that it is useful to the visitor who sees it in the top of the browser window or in a list of bookmarks that have been saved to the computer.

4. Never assign the title “Home” to your home page (i.e. index.html or index.php, etc.).  Unless the page is about the concept of home or a house, calling a page “home” provides no useful information to the search robots or to your site’s visitors knowledge of what your site or this page is really about.  However you can use the word as part of a larger title in a descriptive way, such as “Home to the World’s Cheapest Plumber.”

5. You should experiment with changing your title every once in a while to see if you achieve improved search engine results, in the same way that you would run tests on all of the major variables on your website.