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Today’s visibility tip is all about your title tags.
Video Transcript: In terms of visibility, the title tag is one of the most important components of your web page. Yet, for whatever reason, I see sites every day that don’t take advantage of it. Too often I see sites with a title tag of just their site name or company - on every page of their site - or, even worse, a long, jumbled string of keywords. That’s not going to accomplish much beyond making your site look spammy and cheap.
In terms of search engine optimization, the title tag is one of the most important aspects of your HTML page insofar as helping search spiders understand what your page is about.
Beyond crawlers and spiders though, the title tag is also extremely important to the users of your site. That’s because the title tag is the text that will be displayed at the top of the browser window. it will also be the text displayed in the navigation tabs if you are using a browser that supports tabs like firefox. Either way, it’s an easy way you can help people navigate your site.
One of the most common mistakes concerning title tags is just having one title for every page on your site. Every page on your site has a different focus or theme.. As such, you should have different tile tags for every one of these pages. Search engine spiders are coming to your site every day (hopefully) and their job is to figure out what your pages are about. If every page on your site is titled with just your business or domain name, you aren’t really telling them too much they don’t already know.
Think about it this way, search engine results don’t point at sites as much as they do pages within a site. As such, it’s a lot more effective to individually target and title the pages within your site to maximize your exposure to the internet spiders and make it easy for them to distinguish the pages within your site from one another.
Likewise, for your human users browsing thru your site wiith 10 tabs or windows open all over the place - if every one of those tabs or windows all just say yourcompanyname.com, they’re going to have a really hard time keeping track of what’s what.
If you were in the widget business for instance, you wouldn’t want the title of every page on your site to just be:
<title>Widget World, home of the web’s finest widgets. - WidgetWorld.com</title>
Trust me, neither the search spiders nor the end users care if this is indeed the home of the world’s finest widgets. Make your sales pitches elsewhere.
When you’re creating your title tags, it’s important ot have your most important keywords early in the tag. It’s generally accepted that words towards the beginning of your title tag are counted as being more significant than words later in your title tag. As such, you want to include the name of your site in your title tag - you want people to be able to easily idetify your pages from the title tag, but you should do it at the end of the tag, like we see in our example:
<title>Title Tag Tutorial - Jayde.com</title>
Now, let’s say you have a site that sells widgets. You’ve done your homework and have a separate page dedicated to each type of widget you sell. Each of these pages needs a unique title tag as well. Let’s Say you sell baseball widgets, soccer widgets and hockey widgets. Each of those pages should have it’s own dedicated title text.
If possible, it’s always good to be even more specific. If your company sells widgets for baseball, and you have separate widgets for left handed vs. right handed players you might try to make a page specifically for that and be sure you include that information in the title.
For example:
<title>Left handed baseball widgets for sale - WidgetWorld.com</title>
You want to think about query strings - in other words what words or phrases will people search, that this page should result for. Look at the content of your page, thiink about what that page is most specifically about and then create your title tag using the most specific and logical terms you can, followed by your business or domain name for branding/easy identification.
So, here are a few points you want to keep in mind insofar as your title tags are concerned:
- Create a unique title tag specific to every single page of your site
- Use the most important keywords early in the tag
- use your company name in every tag - towards the end
- Think about query strings (what are people going to search for)
- avoid hyperbole, sales pitches, and slogans
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Title tags are very important. The tips suggested are very helpful. thanks
Keith
Good stuff, but do I need to include my domain name in every title? Is this really good use of a limited number of characters?
Alan
Thanks - I didn’t know that the order of keywords in the title tag made a difference. Time to make some edits to my site!
What would you do if the internet crashed for good? Would you get used to life with less communication and less “being connected” or would you be pretty bummed for the rest of your life?
This is assuming it was not fixed. Perhaps some largescale EMP attack or something that crippled it for the next 50+ years or so.
I’m a long time WPN reader. This was my first time on WPN Videos. I don’t know why I haven’t been here before. Great site and great info that is dead on the money.
I use title tags just like you present it, and it’s been working fine so far. Thanks for the presentation.
Great info. Thanks a lot!
The title tag is the single most important thing that you’ll ever write for any given web page. With a decent title tag, all things are possible.
I notice that my competitors websites always ranked higher, I tweaked my titles (similar to my competitors) and I went from about page 15-20 to page 1 in no time at all!
It does work!
It should be mentioned to make the most of your Title - and the 65-70 characters visible in results - to keep unnecessary (and unhelpful) words out and craft it carefully. Rather than:
“Some of the Most Popular Programs and Accessories for your Apple Mac Computer”
rewrite like this:
“Popular Mac Programs and Best Apple Computer Upgrades and Accessories”
There, I’ve used 6 less characters, cut out ‘empty’ words and said More in less space. There’s really an art to crafting powerful titles. I recommend NOT using “&” ampersands - or apostrophe’s to pluralize something as a space-saving technique in your title: Too many bookmarking and social sites don’t handle those characters well.
Last tip: Fix ‘em, get your most important keywords in there right, then DON’T CHANGE your titles too often. I’ve had sites get ‘punished’ by the search engines for over-futzing..
This is great tip. Thanks a lot for that.
I’m going back over my Title Tags and see some duplicates. I’m going to fix it. Thanks.
quite right, good point
Thomas
Thanks for that article. Excellent tip. I agree.
Thanks Mike, Great data for webmasters. I am starting a 3rd site and I will employed the techniques discussed. Also, you guys are doing a great job educating new webmasters like myself. God Bless!
very usefull information here guys
Thanks for all the specifics. So many tutorials talk about the importance of title tags, but not how to implement them page by page. My first web site, built by someone else, had my company name as the title tag for every page. My SEO was terrible. I have taken steps to correct it and now my site is doing better. Thanks again.
I agree 100% according to lynda video SEO tutorials it says the samething, but one question, how many characters can you put on your tittle, when I reported my site in DreamWeaver it says I have longer tittle tags, if anyone can help please leave a comment in here I will be back.:)
WebProNews is often under appreciated without a doubt.
I agree.Title tags are very important.Thanks for the information
Excellent tip
i fully agree with you and i am sure everybody agrees on this. the title tag is most important. Thanks for info
[...] WebProNews is often under appreciated, checkout their cool video area with short interviews of Lee Odden, Vanessa Fox (google) and Tim Mayor (yahoo), Danny Sullivan and a useful sponsored Title Tag Tutorial (what a neat idea for getting paid and offering something useful). Go > WebProNews Video [...]
Just starting out…this has been v.helpful! Also anyone know where I can get this background music from…it’s great!
more of these please. when’s the next one?
Can you help me sign up with a service that does this for me???
Title tags are moste important so i agree. Thanks for providing this service.
I agree.Title tags are very important.Thanks for the information.
Thanks for that information.
Yeah it’s true!
That is very good advice on the title tag.
I have found that it works.
Very simple tip. However most of the webmasters do make these mistakes. Unique title start with the top keyword of your page is very important.
>> title tag is one of the most important components of your web page
It´s the most important of the head-section!
No new information
Thanks for that info, I wil try on my new site.
Thanks again and I will wait the next tip.
Bye
I would like to be listed in major travel web pages.
Thanks
bang on.
great tips! i’ll try it!
I have always used my title tags wisely and backed them up with the page content.
I find my site nr1 on all 3 SE’s for many and varied terms I have worked into the index page.
Excellent tip! It is very true that the title tags should be different on each and every page, I found that out when my website catalog system had a glitch and changed all of the tags to one same tag on over 100 of my pages. I was removed from pretty much all of the search engines. When the title tags were fixed, my site came back. Utilize title tags, they work!
Yeah, I’ve seen the title tags do make a visibility on the web. Thanx for the tips.
- ilaxi
I agree. Title tags are very important. I changed the title tags of my site and in one week my traffic increased by 22%.