Optimizing title tags

Optimizing title tags for your pages is as much about common sense than anything else. It can all seem a bit fiddly for beginners, but once you've got into the swing of things, you'll wonder what all the fuss was about!

There are two major reasons why you need to optimize title tags for your pages:

1. Title tags can make or break your rankings for a keyword
   Write a good title for a good page within a good site, and you stand much more chance of ranking well for your keyword.

2. They can entice traffic... or send it running to another site
   Presuming you are ranking high enough for surfers to see your page come up on their search results, your title then needs to convince those potential visitors to click on it.

An example title tag

Here's the title for the home page of this site:

Website Traffic Ideas - Simple Ideas to Get More Traffic

... and here's how it comes up in the search engine results page at Google:



As mentioned in our summary of meta tags, the title

• Tells the visitor what to expect
• Contains the keyword for that page
• Looks natural and inviting for the surfer to click on - no spelling mistakes, no excess of exclamation points etc.
• Capitalizes important words to make the entry stand out that little bit more

The detail on optimizing title tags

Use your keyword near the beginning of your title
Within the first two or three words is fine.

Use up to 80 characters, 64 is ideal
If your title is too long, it will be cut off short. On the other hand, too short a title - just one or two words - may not give enough info for anyone to decide whether they want to click or not. So it's a balancing act.

Check the pages on your site to see what title tags show up
Simply do this search on google:

site:www.yourdomain.com

to see a list of all indexed pages of your site.

Then look closely at the title tags:

• Each page should have its own, unique, title tag

• You shouldn't have any pages that don't have a title

• Think... would you click on those titles?

A useful tool to check your title tags

This Content Analysis Tool will flag up pages where there are no title tags, as well as duplicate title tags.

Google also tells you if you've got pages with titles that don't tell anyone anything, such as "Untitled Document" - as well as titles that are too long or too short.

I'm happy to report that, for this site at least, Google told me:

"We didn't detect any content issues with your site"

for which I am profoundly grateful ;)

By the way, this tool also gives you info about any meta description problems and non-indexable content.

So - you're now an expert on optimizing title tags for your site. Go forth and conquer!