Optimizing Your Title Tag
Your page’s title tag is the single most important onsite factor that you need to consider when optimising your site.
Firstly, most engines and directories will consider the keywords you have chosen to appear in your title tag as the key to the site.
Secondly, the title tag is also what the search engines most commonly use as the title of your listing in the search results. So, if this text is unappealing to your potential customers, then they’re not even going to give you the chance of a click, even if you’ve got to the prime positions in the search engines results pages. Your title tag, like much else in SEO, must impress humans as well as search engine robots.
What is a title tag anyway?
Your title tag is what appears at the top of your browser. If you look at the top of this window, you will see the title ‘LeadGenerators Newsletter – May 2006’.
Do I need to do some coding to write a title tag?
You only have to do the smallest bit of coding. This one little piece of work will pay off in spades.
Let’s look at the title tag of this page again; this time as it looks in the HTML of this page:
<TITLE>LeadGenerators Newsletter - May 2006 </TITLE>
Simple, eh?
The title tag as seen above should be placed in the header of your page. This means that it goes between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags within the HTML that makes up your page.
How long should my title tag be?
It’s important that your title tag not be too long. The other tags covered in later sections (concerning descriptions and keywords) have a freer rein on their length, but for the title tag I recommend that you limit yourself to between 50-80 characters. Note that this character limit includes spaces. Different search engines prefer different lengths, but keeping to these limits should cater to most of the important search engines.
What should I include in my title tag?
Aha, now we’re coming to the meat of the article! I recommend that you include your two or three of your most important keyword phrases in the title tag. You must however be very careful NOT to just input a list of keywords. If you just put a string of keywords right in there, the search engines might consider you as a spammer, no matter how great the rest of your site might be. This might ultimately lead to you being blacklisted by the search engines.
Your title tag should include your most important keyword phrases in the form of a readable sentence or pair of sentences. Remember; you’re serving two masters again here. Show the search engines what they want, and show your customers what they want, in a form that they like to read.
Good title tag <TITLE>Australian Holidays from Down Under Vacations</TITLE>
Bad title tag <TITLE>Down Under Vacations, Australia ! Kangaroo, Sydney , Down Under Holiday , Sydney Opera House</TITLE>
By the same token, you gotta remember to sell! Make your title line tempting! Even if you’re sitting at or near the top of the pile of search results you'll find the same point holds true. If your site doesn’t sound interesting or relevant, potential customers won’t click on you!
Think about the length of your title tag. Remember how earlier I told you to stick to 50 to 80 characters? That holds, but in addition you should try to get your most important keywords in at the beginning of your tag. That way there’s no risk of the search engine cutting your keyword off. As a bonus, potential customers see the words they searched on right there in front of their faces.
Finally, remember that each page of your site needs to have its own unique title tag. No copying and pasting; each page of your site has a reason for existing as a separate page, and therefore should have a title tag that reflects its raison d’être . If you sell widgets, your red widget page should talk about red widgets and crimson widgets, whereas your blue widgets page should mention blue and turquoise widgets in the title tag. If someone’s searching for blue widgets, then take them to the exact page where you sell that product, rather than making them click through your site to get there.
OK, that’s all from me on your title tags. Next time I’ll be moving on to take a look at one of the most important features of your site for both your human visitors and for the robots crawling your site.
Huw Thomas is SEO Officer at LeadGenerators, now located on London ’s scenic Sheen Lane .
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