Title Tags
Of all the on-page ranking factors, title tags are probably the most important. They tell the search engines what your page is about. They also show up as the heading link in the SERPs and at the top of your browser.
Here’s where the title appears in your browser:
Here’s where the title appears in SERPs:
Your title tag lives in the <head> section of your HTML document and look something like this:
<title>This is the Title of My Page</title>
And here’s an example from source code (you can right click on your web page and select View Source to see the raw HTML):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<title>AdWords Conversion Tracking with Thesis » SEO Orlando</title>
</head>
Here are some guidelines to help you optimize your title tags:
- Every page should have a unique title.
- Your title can technically be as long as you want, but search engines limit the length that they display: 66 characters for Google, 120 for Yahoo (including spaces). The last full word within this limit will show, and the rest will truncate, represented by ellipses [...].
- Either
- limit the title to the minimum (66) or plan 2 titles (i.e. the first 66 characters are a Google title that makes sense by itself, but the full title shows up to 120 characters and displays in Yahoo) or
- write whatever feels good and test it out vs. other methods to see what works best
- Get keywords near the front of your title and put branding at the end (unless you are the biggest brand in your market and the mention of your brand name will ensure high CTR).
- Optimize for CTR too! Your title should make sense and make people want to click on it – just stuffing all your keywords in the title might not penalize your rankings, but it will make people think twice before clicking on it.
- Use Title Case in most circumstances (First Letter of Each Word Capitalized).
Assuming that our target keyword phrase is “parameter-based URLs,” let’s look at some examples:
Unacceptable: “Mozilla Firefox” (if you don’t even have a title tag, most browsers will just display their own browser name)
Really Bad: “Example.com” (some websites have generic/duplicate titles like putting “Example.com” on every single page or using “Home Page” for the home page “Article” for every article on the site)
OK: “Example.com | Why You Should Avoid Parameter-Based URLs” (the branding at the front isn’t ideal unless you’re a big brand, and your keywords are all at the end of the title)
A Little Better: “Example.com | Parameter-Based URLs – Why You Should Avoid Them” (branding is still at the front, but keywords are closer to the front too)
Pretty Good: “Why You Should Avoid Parameter-Based URLs | Example.com” (keywords aren’t as close to the front as they could be, but branding)
You Should Get Paid for This: “Parameter-Based URLs – Why You Should Avoid Them | Example.com”
One nice thing about title tags is that they’re fairly easy to test out. Once you start ranking for a keyword phrase, try modifying your title tag and see if your position in the SERPs changes. Also try adding modifiers before or after your keyword phrase and see if you can rank for additional long tail terms too.
