How to Write Highly-Optimized Title Tags
In SEO, there are a lot of theories. Optimize this, optimize that, do this, do that. There’s white-hat, and black-hat, and grey-hat, and {insert color} hat to describe the different methodologies and philosophies that make up the practice of Search Engine Optimization. Lots of SEO’s say do this or that and tell you WHY you need to do something, but when you ask HOW they might very well clam up.
For example (and for the purposes of what we’ll be covering in this article), they might vaguely say that “For SEO purposes, You need to write better page titles.” Well that’s just brilliant, now how they hell do you do that?
This is where I say – No worries, I got your back! First, we’ll cover WHY page titles are important, WHERE you can find them, and HOW to make them better.
WHY are page titles so important?
- Simple, page titles are what you click on in the search results, making them prime real estate for your target keywords.
- They should be the first thing a webcrawler sees when it hits your site.
- Your website’s titles give you a great chance to tell search engines (and more importantly users) what your site is about on a very high-level.
- Good page titles can help you show up & stand out in the SERPs for a given search query; meaning you need to make them good to give potential visitors a reason to click through to your site.
WHERE can you find page titles?
In the SERPs…
In your browser…
In your source code…
HOW can you make your page titles more SEO friendly?
Lets go over some quick tips to make your title tags better, as well as some case-by-case examples so that you can see some differences. For the purposes, we’re going to terms associated with the word “fishing” (don’t ask me why I picked that, it was just the first word that came to my brain)…
Tip #1: Include Target Keywords
Search engines are very literal. Therefore, if you want to show up for a particular search query, you actually have to use those “target” keywords in your site, starting with the title tag.
For our purposes, we’ll say our company name is RandomFishingShop.
Let’s say you’re targeting two keywords, “fishing rods”, “fishing tackle”, and “fly fishing”…then you’d probably want to have your title be something like this:
Tip #2: Understand the 65 Character Cut-Off Limit
In the search results, most of the listings (where your title will be showing) get cut off after around 65 character spaces, making it super-important to try to use your most important target keywords before the cut-off point.
Here is an example:
Note: This doesn’t mean that you can’t go over on the character spaces, just be aware of it. In my opinion, it is safe to use between 60-80 characters on your subpages. However, I’m very strict on the homepage and try to stay very precise.
Tip #3: Exclude Stop Words or Non-Essential Keywords
Based on point #2, we know that using character space wisely is a must for creating highly-optimized page titles. This means you have no room for wasted space.
SEO Stop Words are extremely common words that most search engines skip over in order to save disk space, or to speed up indexing. In addition, there are many keywords used in titles that can be considered non-essential, unless you WANT to show up for non-essential keywords. You should try to eliminate both from your title tags.
With stop words & non-essentials (85 character spaces):
Why is this a problem? You’re using the words “The Official Website of…” which basically hold no SEO value, right at the beginning of the title. You may smirk, but this is more common than you think.
Without stop words & non-essential (51 character spaces):
Space cleared by eliminating the Stop words and non-essentials: 34 – this means you can fit about 14 more characters under the 65-character limit.
Tip #4: Understand Keyword Prominence
Keyword prominence basically refers to keywords having more weight when placed towards the beginning of your document or title.
To illustrate my point, in the above example the word “Fishing Rods” is ahead of “Fly Fishing” and “Fishing Tackle”, making it more prominent (and weighted higher). Use this theory to your advantage, and be sure to place your keywords in order of importance.
Tip #5: Try Not to Repeat Phrases, Instead Use Synonyms or Phrase Association
In the above examples, I made this error (on purpose). This was to give you a foundation and to show you this example.
This title (65 character spaces):
Could be consolidated to this (47 character spaces):
Why is this good? By doing this, it gives you extra room to potentially target other keywords. It’s all about making the most of your space!!!
Tip #6: Unless Your Brand Name Is Heavily Searched – Bump It!
Notice in the above examples that I rarely had my business name listed first? That’s on purpose. Unless you’re a major brand, there probably aren’t a lot of people searching on your business name.
What should you do?
- Bump it to the back of the title tag structure
- Eliminate it on homepage all together?
Why? This could free up some more space to target keywords, and there are many other methods that can be employed to ensure you show up #1 for your name. You should try to get optimal use out of your title tags.
Tip #7: Keep Them Unique
This one is pretty simple. Keep all of your page titles different and unique. Why? The example I like to use is this. Imagine having a great author who has written many books, but all of them have the same titles…would you read all the books to ensure they are indeed different or just assume they’re all the same? Now apply that to search engines.
Hope you enjoy. Happy optimizing!
Top Photo Credit: A. Marques on Flickr
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