The Ins
There are tons of people that have made their SEO business only off of Title Tag optimization. While it’s not the end all be all, it sure is a great place for newbies to start. So, here’s the inside scoop on Title Tags.
The Title Tag is a little piece of code that looks something like this:
<title>Trada Blog | Digital Marketing</title>
Title Tags are required for HTML and define what a page is about. You can see Title Tags easily by looking at the text that appears at the top of your browser.
Title tags are also displayed in the search engine results.
Other than your content, Title Tags are the most important element of your site that you can optimize.
The Outs
Whatever you do leave this stuff out:
- Leave out Title Tags that are full of keywords, search engines can see this as a sneaky attempt to skirt the system and penalize you as a result.
- Don’t just write for search engines. Remember that people will see these Title Tags too.
- Leave out default or vague single word titles like “Home” or “Contact”
- Whatever you do, leave out using a single Title Tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages. Search engines and people want to know what the page is about. Duplicate Title Tags don’t help.
The Hows
Here’s how you can rock the Title Tag world with just a few simple steps.
- Keep your Title Tag to 70 characters or less. 70 is the maximum amount of characters that will be displayed in the search engines. Anything longer than 70 gets truncated with an ellipsis …
- Your Title Tag should be concise. The attention span online is measured in seconds. Let them know what the page is all about as efficiently as you can.
- Each page of your site should have a unique Title Tag. As mentioned above, duplicate or empty Title Tags don’t give people or search engines any idea what the page is about.
- Use your most prominent keyword first and your secondary keyword next. Search engines give more importance to the first couple of words in your Title Tag.
- Include your brand name, but put it at the end of the tag. If people would buy your product because of the brand name, put it at the beginning of the tag.
The Whys
When you’re beginning to learn SEO, always ask why! Why are Title Tags important? Here are just a few reasons that will convince anyone.
For the past several years, Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ, has asked the top SEOs around the world to rank the important elements of good SEO. Guess what ranks at the top every year? That’s right, Title Tags.
None other than Google itself will tell you how important Title Tags are to search engines. Google puts out a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, and it states, “A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is.” You can’t get more upfront than that!
Over at Google’s Webmaster Blog, we get even more support for the importance of Title Tags, “Search engines index pages based on the words contained in them, and including descriptive titles helps search engines know what the pages are about.”
The Title Tag is a really low hanging fruit. With a quality keyword list and a couple of hours, you can start to make some real improvement to your ranking in the search engines. Now, get out there and start optimizing!
About Pan Galactic
Pan Galactic is an SEO Agency in St. Louis, Missouri. We also serve many clients as their primary Social Media Marketing firm.
We are renaissance Search Marketers who also have experience in email marketing, display advertising, and paid search. This broad background enables us to create unified strategies for brands across all digital channels and use data from one channel to inform decisions in another. Our past work runs the gamut from small, local businesses to household brand names like Dell Computers, Shasta, Purina, Botox, Columbia Sportswear, Kotex, and Coach.
Pan Galactic has cultivated relationships with the major search engines and Social Networks. Our staff has been a beta tester for the Bing interface, Google’s Agency Land Search Marketing education portal, as well as numerous social media analytics platforms. We are also certified in the use of Google’s Adwords PPC marketing program, Google Analytics, and proficient with paid advertising on various Social Media networks.
Because of our experience with digital marketing, Pan Galactic’s staff has been asked to speak at several local conferences and has been asked to blog for Searchfuel, Trada, Hubspot, Social Fresh, and Marketing Profs.