Page Titles & SEO: 7 Things to Avoid
As I stated previously, page titles are extremely important to SEO and it is very important for you to get it optimized the right way. This is an area that if you do wrong can result in your site being buried in the search results (like treasure) never to be found again!
If you’re looking to optimize your website’s titles, here are some things you should avoid doing. If you didn’t see the first video in the series, here is the link: Page Titles & SEO: The Top 7 Must Do’s.
1. Don’t SPAM Keywords
This is pretty much a bad practice anywhere you go. Try to avoid spamming keywords in your titles. You should try to make your titles highly-targeted, coherent & legible, and enticing for a user to click on.
A badly-spammed page title will look a bunch of non-discriminant babble, and is not generally helpful for your users or search engines. If you’re targeting your titles towards a search engine, not only will a user know but a search engine will too!
Generally, any kind of behavior that isn’t deemed user-friendly will get your rankings knocked down pretty fast.
2. Don’t Use Meaningless Keywords
If you look at the first SEO & Page Titles Video, you’ll know that you need to use your target keywords in your page titles if you ever hope to show up for them in the rankings. This is sort of the opposite. You want to try to avoid using meaningless keywords in your titles, simply because they are a waste of space and the title is such a valuable piece of SEO real estate.
For example, I worked on a site (we’ll call them Company X) whose original homepage title was something like this:
They literally had this starting off every single page on their website. What’s wrong with this, you say? The text, “The official website of the…” is pretty meaningless when it comes to rankings and was really hurting the overall SEO.
I changed the homepage title to something like this:
Now obviously you can replace target keyword #1 and #2 with actual keywords, however you can see my point. Your page titles carry a lot of SEO weight, so don’t waste them.
3. Don’t Make Titles That Are Abnormally, Porn-Starishly Long
Titles are generally cut off after about 65 character spaces in the search results. As I’ve said before it is okay to use more than 65 character spaces, the first 65 are just the most important.
What you need to watch out for here is when your titles start to get not just long, but abnormally porn-starishy long.
65-80 character spaces = long
80-100 character spaces = lesser known porn-star
100 and above = full-fledged porn-icon (i.e. The Ron Jeremy of Page Titles!)
If your titles can be classified as any variance of porn-star, then you should probably make them a little shorter. Otherwise, your rankings may go into hiding very soon!
4. Don’t Leave a Page Untitled
Would you write a book and leave it untitled? No. So don’t leave your website pages untitled. This is just a bad practice and happens far more often than it should.
This is a grade-A rookie mistake, and should never ever happen! Remember, even bad titles are better than no titles at all.
5. Don’t Make Page Titles the Same
Each page should have a unique title, period. Image if the title of every book by a single author were exactly the same. How in the hell would you sort them out?
This is how a search engine feels when it has to sort through your site of 100 pages when all pages titles are exactly the same. A webcrawler’s job is to scan pages quickly, so don’t be surprised if they just skim your same-titled pages instead of give them a full read!
6. Don’t Create Titles That Aren’t Relevant to Content
Imagine picking up the book The DaVinci Code, only to find out the book’s interior pages are actually from The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. How pissed would you be?!?
Now imagine being a searcher, clicking on a result expecting one thing and getting something totally different. Can you say bounce rate!
7. Don’t Use STOP Words (ex: the, and, or, etc)
Like I said in the first video, these words are skipped by search engines and waste space. Try to avoid using them if you can. Luckily, researched it and come up with a detailed list of SEO Stop Words.
Anyhow, hope this helps!
Also, I apologize for my dog’s jingling collar in the background of the video! He doesn’t seem to care about dad’s video!
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