All About The Title Tag

17 Nov All About The Title Tag

Arguably the single most important factor for getting ranked highly in the search engines is how you optimize your title tag.

A unique, keyword-oriented title tag together with strong content can really help move your page up the ranks. But a poorly worded title tag will almost always torpedo whatever is below.

Yet many sites fail to realize this and their rankings suffer.

When constructing a title tag, ask yourself what search engines keywords you want the page to rank the highest for. If your site is about “Pet Grooming in Jacksonville”, then that should be your main title tag, and not “Welcome to Sally’s Pet Place”.

Many more people will type into the search engine box “pet grooming in Jacksonville” than they will “sally’s pet place”, agreed? And the goal of your website is to get visitors and the goal of your title tag is get clickthroughs on that search page.

Now the title tag itself should be kept relatively short to under 40 characters. And avoid unnecessary repetition of words and overuse of symbols. Carefully select each word and use only words and phrases that people might type into search engines when trying to find a site in your niche.

So no extraneous words like “Welcome to…” or “You have reached …”.

Keeping with the pet grooming theme, an acceptable title would be “Pet Grooming in Jacksonville – Sally’s Pet Place” whereas “Welcome to Sally’s Pet Place” would perform poorly.

In general the best-practice template for most title tags is “<your 2-4 main keywords> <separator like ‘-‘ or ‘|’> <business name>”.

Don’t try to over stuff your title tags with keywords or spam. Keep the title short, neat and simple and make sure that the title tag reflects what the page is about.

If your page is on feeding pets don’t label it “pet grooming”.

Also, it’s important to make sure every page on your site has a unique title tag, that means no duplicates!

When the search engines rank and list you the very first thing that shows up is your title tag. But if you have two pages with the same title confusion can arise.