Perhaps you remember the days when cutting-edge webpage design boasted animated gifs and focused on keyword density for top search engine rankings. These days, however, standard fare often combines flash animation with a heavy incoming link campaign. But through all the changes, one element remains constant—the importance of the HTML <title> tag. This little tag was, and still is, the single most important onpage element of high ranking webpages.

To lend perspective, let's wander back for a moment to the late 90's when all this SEO work really got started. The <title> tag was, to put it mildly, tantamount to success. At that time the immensely popular, but now-defunct, Infoseek search engine bestowed top rankings on pages with the highest number of keyword repetitions within the title. This foremost strategy, combined with page freshness, was key. Bear in mind that, at the time, Infoseek was king and Google didn't even exist!

Many an SEO worked around the clock constantly reformatting and resubmitting pages to see what they could, frankly, get away with before Infoseek would finally ban the domain. In many cases the SEO would then just begin anew the whole trial-&-error, push-the-limits process with a new domain. Personally, I remember submitting pages with over 100k worth of text in the <title> tag—and then sat back and basked in the glow of success as my pages rocketed straight to the top in a mere 5 minutes after submitting them. Boy, was that fun!

Alas, such a simplistic approach to SEO didn't last too long; the engines evolved, got much smarter and in turn, SEO work has proportionately increased in difficulty. But one thing that hasn't changed, regardless of which search engine you're targeting, is the importance of getting your <title> tags right. By the way, just to be sure we're on the same page, a