SEO Quick Tips – Page Title Tags
- At September 30, 2011
- By jrs
- In SEO Basics, SEO Quick Tips
0
What It Is:
Web page title. AKA title “tag”.
The “title tag” is a small piece of HTML code that looks like <title>some page title here</title>. It defines the title of a web page for both humans and search engines.
Why You Need It:
The title tag is arguably the single most important piece of information on your web page. Google gives it a lot of weight. Not only does it form the title for your listing in search results pages, it goes an awfully long way to telling the search engines what that page is about.
We have seen web pages move up dozens of positions in the search engine results *just* by adjusting the titles.
What To Do About It:
- Ensure that all your page titles are carefully crafted to include your main keywords and phrases for that specific page. Unless you are Coca-Cola or the New York Times, do not place your “branding” (ie. your company name) at the start of the title. If you include the company name at all, and it is debatable whether you even should, add it at the *end* of the title.
- If you are targeting specific geographic areas, try and include some of them as well.
What NOT To Do:
- The title is not the place to simply “stuff” keywords. Search engines are not that dumb. The actual content on the page must reinforce the chosen keywords.
- Don’t pick keywords based on what you think is important. The only good keywords are the ones that real users actually search for. Do your homework.
The Good, The Bad & The Useless
Example: An accounting firm servicing a specific area. Keyword research has shown that “Tax & Payroll Accounting” in their service area is one of the 5 juiciest targets.
- Useless: Home
- Bad: ABC Accountants – Home
- Good: Tax & Payroll Accounting – ABC Accountants
- Best: Tax & Payroll Accounting – Delaware, Pennsylvania , Maryland
The Techie Stuff:
The “title tag” is a small piece of HTML code that looks likes some page title here. It must be placed in <head> the section of a page.
Depending on how your site is constructed, you can adjust title tags one of several ways:
- For a WordPress site, edit the “Title” field in each post or page. Even better, install a good SEO Plugin like the one by Joost de Valk.
- For a “static” site (ie. not using a platform like WordPress or Drupal), you can find the tag in the page’s source code. Since there are so many ways of programming a web site, it is impossible to say exactly how you would go about editing them.
- Call us!
The title display in Google’s search results is limited to 65 characters, although Google will show a little more if the 65th character falls in the middle of a word. Google will index a much longer title however, but remember, Google is not dumb. So called “keyword stuffing” has not worked since the 1990′s.
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