Page Titles & SEO
The HTML tag – Title – is so important for search engine optimization (“SEO”) that we feel it merits its own blog post. According to search engine experts, using keywords in a well-crafted Title tag is one of the most important factors for both:
- Getting a site to rank accurately and prominently in search engine results, and
- Getting the user to choose your website from the search engine results page (“SERP”).
What Are Page Titles?
The Page Title is the content within the Title tag on an HTML page. Each page of a website should have its own unique Title tag.
You can see what a page title is by looking at the bar in the browser window and on the tab you happen to be on. In the browser Firefox, for example, the title is “An SEO & Web Marketing Blog: Scatterings”. (The search term we used was “web marketing blog”.)
Another way to see the title is to select View -> Source from your browser’s menu. Towards the top of the page you will see the HTML title tags surrounding the actual title:
Here is how the webpage associated with this Title tag appears on Google’s search results page:
Notice that the Title is in a bigger typeface in the first line of the results and that our search term, “web marketing blog”, is bold. Because Google accounts about 2/3rds of all Internet search traffic, we think that tailoring Title tags for Google is very important.
UPDATE (November 10, 2009): Google Webmaster Central announced that Google may use text other than the Title in its SERPs – particularly when a website has duplicate Titles. This doesn’t mean you should not write unique, descriptive Titles. If you do that, you won’t get the SEO benefit that unique, descriptive Title tags provide.
How to Write Page Titles
Each page should have a unique Title tag that simply describes its content, similar to the title of a newspaper article, i.e., something that tells people what is on the page and makes them want to click on your site’s link.
Good webpage titles incorporate the following factors:
Accurately Describe the Page’s Content
Write a title for each page on your site that simply and accurately describes the content of that particular page. The search engines may discount a page whose title does not reflect the content on the page. Also, making a Title that is pleasant and informative for human readers will increase the likelihood that human readers will choose your site from the long list in the search engine results page. Enter one of your target keywords into Google and see how your competition looks on the SERP. This can give you a good idea of how to create a Title that stands out on the SERP.
Writing an individual Title for each page of a site is labor intensive so many sites do not do this, which means that sites that contain accurate titles for each individual page have a key advantage.
Use Keywords
Whenever practical, use keywords. Keyword research indicates which keywords are more important for a site. However, it is more important that the Title accurately describes the pages contents – with or without keywords.
Place Important Words Early in the Title
Search engines and people seem to believe that links that most directly reflect what they’ve searched for are the most relevant. So it makes sense to put what search engines and people are looking for first this makes finding easier for them. Both are trying to find specific information.
The tendency is to always have a company name, followed by the real page title. This is usually counterproductive, since the user is probably not looking for a company name. For example, think about newspaper articles. They do not typically contain the name of the publication, as in
New York Times: Wayward Humpback Pair Moves Toward Ocean
Here’s how the Title for the Wayward Humpback article on NYTimes.com looks in Google’s SERP:
In our first example, the website actually is an SEO and web marketing blog, and that is what the website owner puts first in the Title, and the name of the site, Scatterings, appears at the end of the Title.
Formatting the Title Tag
It’s a good idea to capitalize most of the words in the title because it’s good grammar.
Also, remember that Google only displays the first 65 characters of the Title tag. Additional characters can help for SEO, but don’t ever stuff keywords – i.e., make webpages verbose for the sake of SEO – in your Title tag or any part of your website. Also, if your Title is longer than 65 characters, people will see only part of it on the SERP, which means the Title may not make sense on the SERP (the omitted section will be replaced with “…”).
[Thank you to Tracy Rabold for this article - Ed.]
