The Page Title

Effective page titles are one of the most basic and most effective means to search engine optimization. It is a simple concept but can be very complicated at the same time. The right page titles alone can make a huge difference with niche terms in your SEO campaign. The challenge is to make your Page Title both search engine friendly and appealing to the end user. This can be much more difficult than you think. In case you don’t already know your page title is everything between the <title>…</title> tags that you see in your html document signifying the title or purpose of that page. This is how Google represents that page title in it’s organic results:

The page title you see is the one that says “Utah Web Development and Utah SEO Firm | Professional Web Design…”. You can now see the importance of making a page title user friendly. If it’s not appealing to the end user, then they simply will not click on it. So it’s only half the battle to get this page title to help you receive top organic results, the other half is persuading the end user to click on it. You can see in the above example that the page title describes to the end user what the website is about, and it also contains keywords that obviously reflect what that website is trying to compete for.

Some Tips

To start, assuming that you have already done the research necessary to find the top 6-12 keywords that you want to compete for organically, you need to place a focus on placing your keywords inside your title tag. The black hat and lazy way of doing this is to simply just stuff the title tag with keywords. But we are not going to do that. We want to focus on doing it the right way. Remember when placing keywords in your page title to not forget about the end user who is going to be reading this page title. And that’s the next step, after placing your keyword in the page title make your page title appealing to the end user which leads to my next step, which is providing relevance between the page title and it’s specific page. Don’t put a keyword in your title tag that has nothing to do with that specific page. Big mistake. And yes, you want to have a different page title for each individual page on your website. If you have a static website that’s easy as each static page has it’s own title tag at the top of the code. If your site is dynamic then you need to make sure that you have a dynamic title tags built in.

Something You Might Not Know

Google is very interested in your organic listing and how appealing your page titles are to the searcher. If you have a high bounce rate, meaning you are getting clicks but people are quickly clicking the “back” button then you are going to start seeing penalizations from Google. Another way for Google to see if their results are spammy at all.

Work Before The Page Title

The major work you need to complete before writing your page titles is your keyword research and the layout and planning of your content organization. That takes alot of work but will save you in the long haul. Don’t worry about your page titles until you have accomplished that first. Once that has been completed my tips that I have given you in this article will come much easier and you will benefit from the organic results much more.

Final Note

There are many more advanced techniques that SEO’s use to writing page titles. I plan on divulging many of those to you throughout this blog as time goes on. This article was meant to give you a basic rundown of what page titles are how and what basic fundamentals you need to take.

Sponsor: Reliable Web Hosting, Unlimited Domains, $6.95 a month with Bluehost.com