Page Title Optimization – SEO Tips, Tricks and Techniques
Table of Contents
What is Page Title?
The page title (not to be confused with the heading for a page) is a string of text, defined by contents of the <TITLE> element in the <HEAD> section of the HTML document. It is extremely important that all Web pages (each of the pages on your Web site) have titles. Because the title is visible both in the title bar of a browser window, as well as the headline of a search engine result.
A simplified version might look like:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Document Title Here</TITLE>
<META-NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">
<META-NAME="description" CONTENT="200 character site description goes here">
<META-NAME="robots" CONTENT="index, follow">
</HEAD>
</HTML>
The title tag reflects the content on your page.
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Importance of the <TITLE> tag
Title tag information identifies and describes your pages. Titles tell readers where the information contained on a page originated. It functions as a sort of virtual business card for your pages. Search bots read the page titles and use the information to determine what the pages are about. Most Web browsers display a document’s title in the top line of the screen. When users print a page from your Web site, the title usually appears at the top of the page at the left. When someone bookmarks your site or adds it to their “Favorites,” the title appears as the description in his or her bookmark file. These are all reasons that it is important that a page’s title reflect an accurate description of the page.
More importantly, the title tag is typically what the target market sees in search results in some of the major search engines. A typical search result consists of the title tag as the link to the Web site, a brief description of the Web site, and the URL. Every page of your Web site should have a unique title tag and each title tag should accurately describe the page content. Your target market should be able to read the title tag and understand what the page they are about to view contains. It is arguably one of the most important factors in search engine optimization because it is both an important factor in search engine rankings, as well as a critical call to action that can enhance the click-through rate (CTR). If you have a keyword between your TITLE tags that competing pages don’t have, you have a good chance of getting at or near the top of the search results.
HTML page titles show up as the first line of clickable text in most search engine results.
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Optimizing Page Title
Keep your title tags brief – in the realm of five to ten words. The longer your title tag is, the more diluted your keywords become and the more likely your title tag is to be truncated by a search engine. To get your message across, you should include important keywords toward the beginning of the title and make sure that the first 40 to 60 or so characters of your title form a complete thought. Google displays a maximum of 66 characters. Yahoo! search, on the other hand, permits up to 120 characters for a title tag. Presently Google and Yahoo! Search are the two most important search engines; use their requirements as an approximation when designing your title tag. My advice is to include your most important keyword phrases first, within Google’s 66-character range. Also keep in mind that people will see that title in the search results, and they’re more likely to click on a site that has a title that flows and is descriptive – not a list.
- Make sure the <TITLE> tag is the first element in the <HEAD> section of your page – this makes it easier to find by Google.
- Keep your title tags short. Although the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has suggested the lens of the page title to be less than 65 characters, some search engines will only include the first 40 or 50 characters (including spaces) of the page title. So, limiting the page title to 40 characters or less is a good SEO strategy.
- Each page should have a unique title.
- Spell check your title tags.
- Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords.
- Write titles using capitals, like the title of a book.
- Use a grammatically correct sentence as the title, rather than just a list of keywords.
- Always try to include the most relevant keyword(s) in the page title. Many engines place a high degree of relevancy on pages that mention a search keyword in the page title.
- You should not include your company name in the title unless your company name is so well known as to be a keyword. If you must include your company name in the title, put it at the end.
- Never leave your title tags blank. Having no Page Title on your page can make it practically impossible to find it in any search engine.
- Limit the number of two-letter words and very common words (known as stop words), such as as, the, and a, because the search engines ignore them.
- Always add keywords in title tags that reflect the content on your page and always use the most important keywords and leave out less important keywords.
- If you want, you can repeat the primary keywords once.
- Try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in every title of every page.
- Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases.
- Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase on your specific product, service, or content pages.
- Avoid stuffing of keywords in the page title and also in the content. Search engines will definitely ban your site or will not include your webpage in their databases, as such stuffing is considered as keyword spamming.
- See what other people are doing.
- Always search Google for similar articles or tutorials. Then see what top ranking pages have done with their title tags. Do not copy their title tags, but you can come away with a few ideas that may help you write your title tags.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment with title tags and see what works best for your site and search engines. Writing good title tags takes time and will only help your site.
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I am A.N.M. Saiful Islam. Open Source Contributor, Professional Web Application Developer and currently working with Web Alive as a Software Engineer.
Thank you for the post!
thank you for the tips, its very usefull
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LOVE your site, will visit again
Submitted this post to Google News Reader.
I’ve been searching for this information for some time thanks!
There are various questions that I had about link building but you have really done a great job clearing most of the up for me, thanks.
nice ! agree on most of that, but theres a contradiction.
You say use natural form for your titles, eg a sentence as opposed to keywords only, but then go on to say not to use ‘the’, ‘and’ ‘as’ etc as search engines ignore them. All naturally speaking sentences will use these stop words.
I don’t usuall post a reply but this is good work, keep it up.
What a facinating article. I’m looking for a marketing expert to help with a project, could you help?
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I’ll be grateful