Title is a key field used by the search engines to rank results. The title tag is crucial for them. The text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page (see the Search Engine Placement Tips section for more details). In addition, all major crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings. Pages that have titles that match the searcher's terms will generally place at the top. Consequently, search-engine-marketing specialists - the people who are experts in designing web sites so that they will be found when certain key words are used - spend a lot of time making titles meaningful. This article in Pandia advised:

"Your Title Tag should contain about five to seven words or 50-75 characters including spaces. It is a brief, compelling description of the business or product described on the web page. If possible, begin the Title with the main key phrase. Note that this key phrase must appear in the web page copy. Use concise, persuasive copy that urges people to visit the page." [Source Do You Still Need Meta Tags?, by Paul Bruemmer.]

Titles on pages have improved greatly over the last two years thanks to this attention. But we, as searchers, must still give some thought to what words are most likely to be used.

Search tips:

• Use nouns - names, places; stock words like study, research, report.
• Consider synonyms. Author may not have used the word you would.
• Consider broad versus specific. Author may have described the document broadly or very specifically. You might have to try both.
• Only look for a couple of words. Titles are often short.

Frames: If the Web site is presented in frames, we won't able to search the title of individual pages. Most search engines do not index pages within a frameset. In that case, we can only search on the title at the site level. For example, the title of this section in InfoTech 8 is Module 3 -Information Technologies-this is what you would see at a search engine, but the title of the page is Title Field Searching.

Spam: Sometimes you will get result listings where your search terms do not appear in the title. In fact, the title has been stuffed with so many terms that it exceeds the allowed length and is cut off. If you click through you'll see the very long title at the top, likely containing your terms. This is spam indexing, and sites who are caught doing it are penalized by the search engine.

Methods of Title Searching

One may search in the title by using either the field name in a search query or a form-based query sheet. The field name is faster.

Method 1: Field Name

At Google, MSN Search, Yahoo, and Exalead enter the word intitle: (with the colon) followed by the word or phrase you want to find. Do not leave any spaces.

• intitle:alternative medicine pets -- looks for alternative in title and medicine and pets anywhere. It give a higher ranking to pages that also have medicine or pets in the title.
  
• intitle:"alternative medicine" pets -- looks for the phrase alternative medicine in the title and pets anywhere.

Google and Yahoo also support allintitle: looks for all words in the title. At Exalead and MSN Search you can accomplish the same by using parentheses around the words; eg (apples pears oranges).

Teoma and Ask Jeeves use

• intitle: ALL words in title

Gigablast:

• title: Word or phrase in title - but it is very unreliable.

Method 2: Form

Choose from a form: words in title, in page title or similar wording. Then enter the word into the box on the search form.