Beginners SEO – Quality Page Titles Rule
July 14, 2011
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Beginners SEO – Quality Page Titles Rule
If you have been around the SEO ballpark a time or two this information is going to be redundant. However, this blog is geared towards the local entrepreneur that requires small business SEO solutions. Before we begin this post, we are assuming that you already have chosen your websites targeted keyword phrases.
After selecting your keyword phrases you will need to know what to do with them. This is where the page title becomes hugely important. First off you need to know that every website page should have a page title, most do but some don’t. The page title is similar to a book title and it defines what your web page is all about for the search engines.
Get this wrong and everything else that you do is basically a waste of time and effort. You can locate any websites page title by looking in the uppermost left hand corner of your browser in Firefox. If your websites url is listed in this area this is a really bad thing. It means that your web page has no title and will never be found in the search results unless you are specifically searching for your domain name.
The second greatest error related to page titles is this. Many websites are created using default settings provided by many website building programs. These default settings often label your pages as Home, About Us, or Contact. These are perfectly good navigation tags to describe your pages to your visitors. However, they are of little use to the search engines. Do a Google search for home and it will produce 7 billion results. Your site has little chance to be found this way. It also does not describe what your web page is about.
The page titles are part of the source code that the search engine reads that do not appear as content on your pages. Essentially each webpage has two titles. One is primarily used for navigating around your website by your visitors. It is part of your navigation menu. The page title that appears in the source code is used to define your web page for the search engines. Technically, both page titles appear in the source code. It is the web page “title” that we are discussing today.
The page title is the SEO equivalent to location, location, and location used in real estate to describe the most important item in real estate selling. The same is true for the page title if you want to be positioned high in the search engine rankings. There are a few things that you need to know about creating effective page titles.
You must begin to think of website page titles as book titles. You should also realize that you have two distinctly different audiences that will be reading your titles. They are the search engines and potential customers. You need to also know that Google limits that amount of characters that it presents in its search results to around 65 – 70 characters and spaces. Your title can go longer but that portion will not appear in the results. The words decrease in importance as the title gets longer. So the pages most important keywords should appear first.
Never repeat your keyword words in your page titles. This is basic SEO 101 but I see companies that provide SEO make this mistake everyday. Here is example of a page title from an out of town company that competes here is Tucson. Their page title reads “Tucson SEO | Tucson SEO Company | Tucson Internet Marketing, PPC …” They used Tucson Three Times and SEO twice and also included dividing marks and it went longer than allowed that’s why you see this at the end …
When search engines deliver their search results they include three pieces of information. The first piece of information is the page title. Roughly about 45% of searchers use this title to decide if they will visit your website. The second or middle piece of information is called the snippet and another 45% of searchers use this information when choosing if they will visit a site. The final 10% will of searchers will use the web pages url as their determining factor. So your page title is your first and best opportunity to make a good impression.
You also need to keep in mind that your page title does not need to read like a sentence. It is wise to avoid any throw away words such as how, the, if, and so on. You also should avoid using commas and symbols such as @,$, or /. If you look up at the upper left hand corner of your browser you will see that we have titled this page Beginners SEO Search Engine Optimization Services Solutions.
The page title tells the search engines this is what this page is about. Now, this is where this all gets very interesting indeed. Any combination of these words may be used by a potential search engine user. If these targeted keyword phrases also appear in the page title, on the web page, and in your page description tag your chances of appearing in the search results increase dramatically.
Are you ready to create effective page titles?
What say you?
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Comments
2 Responses to “Beginners SEO – Quality Page Titles Rule”
thanks for the great info here I am a novice and appreciated the depth of information on SEO particiclarly I found the exmples to vert instructive and have bookmarked the site to visit on regular basis as part of my self trainig
look good feel better
Thank you for your great post. It is amazing how many webmasters miss out on such great opportunities to feature keywords in their HTML title. I still seem to think that the HTML title is the first thing that a search engine bot “sees” when it crawls a website.
A keyword enriched HTML title still remains as one of the top SEO elements today! Furthermore, keywords located at the beginning of the HTML title seem to garner more weight as well! You did a good job of instilling this point when you mentioned that keywords lose their value as the HTML title gets longer.
I find it a challenge to keep HTML titles under the 70 characters. You are again correct in that you want to keep your titles at this length in order to not show a truncated message to your audience.
Thank you again for the great information!