Page Titles & SEO: The Top 7 Must Do’s
Having high-quality page titles is among the top factors in how well/poorly your website will rank. Therefore, they should be considered prime real estate when it comes to your Search Engine Optimization campaign.
Why are page titles so important, you say?
- Your page titles are the 1st thing a webcrawler will read when entering your website
- Page titles are your most prominent opportunity to give them a solid description of your website’s contents.
- Your page titles actually show up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
- Having good titles will help you here in a couple ways: A) May help you get ranked higher for your target keywords, B) May make your result more enticing to click on in the SERPs. So think of it like an ad; you need to stand out!
So now that you see how important they are, what can you do to improve them? I’ve come up with a handy short-list of different ways you can make your page titles more SEO-friendly.
1. Use Your Target Keywords & Their Variations
This is the big one! In order to begin to show up for your target keywords, you must actually mention them in your website’s title. If you do a good job using your target keywords here, it may result in an instant traffic boost (not guaranteed, and also dependent on on-page HTML content).
2. Place Most Important Keywords Towards the Front
This is called “Keyword Prominence”. Keyword prominence refers to the added value placed on keywords that appear towards the beginning of key elements of your website (i.e. your page titles).
By placing your most valuable keywords towards the beginning of your title, search engines will know to weight those words more heavily when serving up your page.
3. Make Good Use of the First 65 Character Spaces
That is generally the point at which your page titles is cut off in the SERPs. This is not to say that you can’t have page titles that are longer than 65 characters, but if you go with the Keyword Prominence theory then the keywords before the cut-off point become more valuable than those that fall after it.
4. Eliminate SEO Stop-Words
Stop words are commonly used words that are simply skipped over by search engines so that they can scan a page faster. You have a limited amount of space to make an impact on both users and search engines, so try to avoid using them if you can as they are a big waste of space.
Here is a list of SEO Stop-Words.
5. Include a Main Service Area (If Applicable)
If you’re a business (or a website) that services a specific area, then you’d better mention it in your title. Otherwise, you have little hope of showing up for locality-based searches in your area.
6. Make it Readable & Enticing to Click On in the SERPs
Make sure that your titles are readable, legible, and generally enticing to click on. This means don’t spam keywords, make sure you use capitalization properly, and make it more appealing to click on.
Would you click on a listing that said this:
“Cars Toyota Columbus Honda Nissan Best Deals Scion Ohio…” or “Toyota, Nissan, Scion – Best Deals – Columbus, Ohio”?
I’d probably pick the 2nd one.
7. Establish Your Brand
If you’re an up-and-coming or an already-established business, this is super important. Believe it or not, people out there are searching for your business name, and this is a place where you NEED to be present.
This means that it is super-important to put your business name in your title. Unless you’re a strong brand with keywords in your name, place it at the end to lend more credence to your target keywords.
Alrighty, those are my main tips! If you guys think of anything that I haven’t thought of, please send them my way. Otherwise, hope this helps and have a great day!
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Comments
2 Responses to “Page Titles & SEO: The Top 7 Must Do’s”
Phil Buckley said:
Just talked about this stuff at an SEO meetup last night… the low hanging fruit that you should do right away.
Good advice, especially the title tag, we saw one site last night that had the title “index.html” – ugh.
August 26th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Jacob Stoops said:
Yeah…title tags can have a pretty big impact if you use them correctly.
August 26th, 2009 at 9:14 am
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