The title element of your web page is meant to be a clear and accurate description of your page’s content. The title tags are not only crucial to your user’s overall web experience, but also for the all-important search engine optimization. Your goal is to create an incredibly descriptive key-word rich title tag. In fact, keyword usage in your title tag may well be the most important place overall, garnering you the best rankings.
You want to make sure that your title tags get you the most clicks possible from a Google search, not to mention that when your stories are shared on Facebook the title tag is often the heading. Title tags are also used as the default text whenever you bookmark a site. Don’t forget that title tags are also used as the text in any links to your website, therefore placing keywords in your title tags can add that extra “oomph” to your search engine rankings. In short, anyone who is looking for a quick boost to their website rankings should look at their website title tags where small changes can net huge gains.
Best Practices for Optimizing Your Title Tags
Keyword research is, well, key as your chosen keywords and keyword phrases are used in many places within your site, over and over. Start with solid keyword research, and ensure your keywords are exceptionally relevant to your pages. It’s a good idea to have one primary keyword phrase and at least three secondary phrases for each page. Your most important keyword phrase will be used at the beginning of your title tag since Google gives greater importance to the words at the beginning. Using your keyword phrase at the beginning of your title tag will send a signal to the search engines that this is what your page is all about, and if you want your company name included, place it at the end of the title tag.
Since Google will not display more than seventy characters from your title tag as the title of the search result, try to keep it below 100 characters. You do get credit for words beyond the seventy character limit, they just won’t be displayed. Use hyphens wisely to be recognized for variations of the same keyword phrase. Your title tag needs to be the most unique seventy to one hundred characters you can possibly come up with. It should be specific and relevant to each and every web page, and you should not duplicate title tags among the pages of your site. Rather than listing a series of keywords or keyword phrases separated by commas, your title tag should be a clear sentence, description or phrase. Using synonyms can be a great way of adding repetition into a title tag without repeating the same word.
Title Tags Improve Click-Through
Title tags can be a great way to get people to click on the search results to get to your site so long as your title clearly states you have what they need. The search engines will also highlight the keywords which were part of the actual search—another clear benefit of using your keywords and keyword phrases in your title tag. Creating a compelling title tag will obviously pull in more visitors from the search engine results, so it’s very important not to just consider SEO and keyword usage, rather think about your typical user’s entire web experience. Title tags can be a relatively simply way to get maximum return on your website as a whole.
