While I'm sure some of them are from sites discussing untitled pages, most of them are just poor schlubs who are missing out on one of the fundamental ways to increase your search engine visibility: the lowly title tag.

I expected most of them to be do-it-yourself sites by people not very savvy to the ways of the web...and boy, was I wrong. A significant percentage of the sites I glanced it on this search result were obviously the work of professional web designers - web designers who should be slapped upside the head because they are doing such a major disservice by ignoring the title tag on the pages of their client's site.

I started thinking about this (again) when I read the post Title tags: SEO by any other name at Blog Business World. Wayne has some excellent points about the power of the title tag.

Often ignored in race to add more incoming links, and to create other more glamorous on page copy, the title tag is a powerful tool and should be utilized to its fullest advantage. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The title tag helps the search engines decide the topic and theme of the web page being crawled for indexing. When a search for keywords is conducted, the title tag is given heavy consideration by all search engine algorithms.

While I do pay attention to my title tags on both my static pages and my blogs, I've already made one of Wayne's suggested changes. I altered my individual archive template (in Movable Type) to put the post title first, and then the name of my blog.

I'm interested to see if that makes a difference in my traffic. While I've been pleased with my stats lately, there is always room for improvement.