Easy to overlook, huh? Well, read on to find out why it’s important to remember to add an optimized title to your web page and how to do it.
Why is the Web Page Title Tag Important?
Google and Bing love page titles! It could be the single-biggest on-page SEO metric for Bing. This means that the keywords you use in the title can influence where your web page shows up in search engine rankings. A good title can move your page up in the results!
How to Add Optimized Web Page Title Tags to Your Website
Step 1 – Write an Optimized Title Tag
Identify the most important keyword phrase for your webpage. Here’s a little tool to help you write titles that are optimized to the proper length for Google search engine results pages (SERPs) – http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html
A good title places the most important keyword phrase near the beginning, is descriptive of your web page’s content, makes sense to read and is the proper length for search engine results to display.
Step 2 – Add the Title to Web Page
If you have an HTML website. Here’s what a title tag looks like in html code – <title>Important Info Here</title> You would use a code editor and place this code near the top of your page.
If your website uses WordPress, there are helpful plugins to help you get your title in place. The default titles created by WordPress are not optimized usually. Install either WordPress SEO by Yoast or All in One Seo and you will have a field on your blog post editing window for your title.
A Few Tips to Make Your Web Page Title SEO Awesome
Stop Words and Separators
Stop words are words such as “the”, “he”, “is”, “at”. Using them in your titles doesn’t cause any indexing problems but they won’t help your keyword phrase ranking. So, you can leave them out of your titles. You can use commas or pipes “|” as word separators in your titles. Don’t use underscores.
Keyword Stuffing is Lame
Your title shouldn’t just repeat keywords. Write your title tag for HUMANS to read, not just search engines. Place your most important keyword phrase at the beginning of the title and make sure it reads well. Click to see examples of keyword stuffing provided by Google.
Company Branding
It’s not necessary to include your company name in your title. If you have room, put it at the end of the title.
Common Problems with Titles
Duplicate Titles: Set up a Google Webmaster Tools account and add your website. You may need your web developer to help with this setup. After Google has scanned your site, you will be able to see if there are any duplicate titles under the Diagnostics tab. Google Webmaster Tools will also alert you to other possible issues with your website.
Too Short or Too Long Titles: An optimal title is 65-70 characters in length. Longer titles may be shortened or replaced in the search engine results.
Missing or Non-Relevant Titles: All web pages should have unique titles that relate to your page’s content. Google may create titles for web pages with no title or irrelevant titles.
Hype Avoid all caps and emphatic punctuation exclamation marks. It’s just cheesy.
Get Started!
This is plenty of information to get your website on the way to title excellence. Let me know if you need help or have any questions.
