From an search engine optimization perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. It gets the most weight by the search engines.

Most blogs don’t have search engine optimal title tags. (Heck, most sites in general don’t have optimal title tags!) The best title tag is one that LEADS with the targeted keywords. But unfortunately most blogs lead with the name of the blog. Instead that should go at the end.

We just did some optimization to BusinessBlogConsulting.com and I’m happy to say that’s now the case there: the blog name is at the end.

In addition, it’s good to customize the title tag of your home page to have some good keywords in them. For BusinessBlogConsulting.com that meant including phrases like “corporate blogs” and “business blogging” and including both singular and plural forms “blog” and “blogs”, as well as the verb tense “blogging”. (The old title tag was “Business Blog Consulting”. Now it’s “Business Blog Consulting: Everything about Corporate Blogs and Business Blogging”)

Creating a custom title tag for your blog’s home page is well worth doing. Consider this: on this blog I decided to target the search phrase “web marketing blog”. By simply changing the home page title tag from “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings” to “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings: Web Marketing Blog” and adding a mention of “web marketing blog” once in the body copy, I went from nowhere for “web marketing blog” in Google to currently #8 out of 55,200,000!

That’s an important point, by the way: Make sure the keywords you are targeting aren’t just in the title tag but also in the body copy as well. Otherwise it’s not reinforcing your keyword focus to the search engines sufficiently. On BusinessBlogConsulting.com we just added “corporate blogs” to the home page title and body copy. Hopefully I’ll be able to report back soon that BusinessBlogConsulting.com is highly ranked for “corporate blogs”!

UPDATE: BusinessBlogConsulting.com is now on page 2 in Google for “corporate blogs”. Not bad for a couple minutes of effort!