What is a Title Tag?
Title tags are part of the meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML inside the < head> area. Think of title tags like the title of the chapter of a book. It tells people and search engines what your page is about.
Title tags are also part of what makes people decide whether to visit your site when it shows up in the search results. The title tag should contain important keywords to help the search engine determine what the page is about.
Write title tags for humans; format them for search engines.
NOTE: Every experienced SEO has their own unique methods to doing this, so I'm going to give you best practices along with some of my methods. However, there are a million ways to write a title tag.
What Does the Title Tag Look Like?
The title tag looks like this in your HTML code:
<title>Important Words Go Here </title>
REMEMBER: A title tag is THE MOST IMPORTANT SINGLE TAG in your page. It tells the search engines what your page is about. It is still vitally important to your SEO strategy.
What to follow for writing title to make it search engines friendly
When you're writing your title tag what do you need to know? Here's a quick checklist with some tips on how to write optimized title tags:
· Length: Title tags should be a maximum of 70 characters long, including spaces.
· Keyword Placement: Your most important words (keywords) need to be first in your title tag, with your least important words being last in the title tag (most to least). However, if you're working in a language that reads right-to-left, then it is reversed, and it would be least important to most important.
· Keyword Separation: Use pipes | to separate important (keyword) phrases (no commas, underscores, dashes or any other punctuation unless the keyword is written that way).
· Wording: Keep your important phrases short and simple. Leave out words that would make it read like a sentence. (e.g., and, if, but, then, etc.)
· Company Name: If your company name is not part of the important (keyword) phrases, put it at the end of the title tag; if it is part of your important words, put it as the first words in the title tag. Some SEOs will tell you to leave it out. You can leave it in for branding purposes – so people will see the brand and click. This isn't valid for all sites.
· DON'T DUPLICATE Title Tags: They must be written differently for every page. Don't mass replicate your title tags.
· Make It Relevant: Title tags must be written to be descriptive of the content on the page. (e.g., the About Page would be:
About | Important Keywords | Company Name
or
Important Keywords | About Us | Company Name
Avoid using stop words
Stop words are words that carry little to no keyword value. Your best keywords are, grammatically speaking, nouns and verbs, with adjectives in close support. But function wordsare your stop words, which consist of:
· articles (such as “the”, “an” and “a”)
· auxiliary verbs (such as “am”, “is”, and “can”)
· conjunctions (such as “and”, “or”, “but” and “while”)
· particles (such as “if”, “then”, and “thus”)
· prepositions (such as “of”, “that”, “on” and “for”)
· pronouns (such as “he”, “we”, “which” and “her”)
· and more
Keyword Stuffed Title Tags
You've probably come across badly written title tags that try to rank for everything or repeat a word over and over. Keyword stuffing is the worst offense when it comes to title tags.
Say your site is trying to rank for Blue Bells and Yellow Bells. Many times you will see the main keyword repeated multiple times across the title tag. It might appear like this:
Blue Bells, Yellow Bells, All Types of Bells | Bells Bells and More | Doors.com
This is bad title tag writing. You don't need to repeatedly write the keyword. Google especially can pick up the keywords like your eyes can read them, so you would best to rewrite this as
Blue & Yellow Bells | Doorbells | Doors.com
We removed the extra words, combined the products (if possible you would split these products to separate pages, a blue and a yellow, but this isn't always feasible or desirable) and added a category keyword which would appear in the middle of the title tag on all doorbell related page titles, then end it with the domain name (again this is for branding purposes – there are also good reasons to not do this, it depends on the SEO).
Now our title tag is short, sweet, simple, and to the point. We have also categorized it and added in branding for good measure.
We also took out the word "and" and replaced it with an ampersand (&) so that you don't accidentally relate the two items and make Google think you want people who are looking for Blue AND Yellow Bells.
