6 Steps to Optimizing Your Page Titles
There is a big push right now to ensure websites are built correctly and are abiding by the Google Webmaster Guidelines to ensure they are not hit by the latest search engine algorithm releases. But let’s not forget about the basics of search engine optimization. Page titles for the content you publish online are one of the biggest ranking factors. Additionally, optimized title tags are important, because it’s the first thing that your visitors see in the search results.
Step 1: check the HTML code of your web pages
It’s astonishing how many pages have more than one title tag in the code. If your pages have more than one title tag, they will confuse search engine robots. The tags might not be read at all or, even worse, search engines might interpret this as a spamming attempt.
Step 2: use your keywords in your web page titles
Use the most relevant keywords at the beginning of your web page titles. Many people only scan the beginning of the titles so make sure that the beginning of the title tag contains the right words.
Step 3: make the titles clear, predictable and irresistible
The readers of your web page titles should know what your web page is about and the title should lead to a page that meets the expectations of the searcher.
The web page title is the first thing that people see in the search results. Make sure that the wording of your web page titles is appealing, emotional and irresistible.
Step 4: keep the titles short
You should keep the length of your web page titles below 70 characters. The reason for that is that most search engines truncate the titles after 65-70 characters on the search result pages.
Step 5: remove unnecessary words
Words such as “homepage”, “Index” and your company name usually don’t help your search engine rankings. Remove these words from the title tags of your web pages. Your title tags will become more relevant to the actual keywords then.
Step 6: use unique title tags
Don’t use the same title tags on more than one page. Each page should have a unique title tag that reflects the content of the web page. In general, optimize different pages of your website for different keywords. The more pages of your website you optimize the better. If you have web pages on your site with the same title tags, Google will report that as a duplicate page title error and reduce your page rank.
Having trouble choosing an optimized page title?
Matt Morgan, CEO at Optimize Worldwide, explains how to choose optimized key phrases for your blog articles, website content, and videos to help obtain top search engine rank in Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
View video on YouTube »
