Implementing The Title Tag For Traffic
by Dirk Andersen
As far as search engine optimization goes, you should focus first and foremost on the title tag of your main page. This is the most important sentence on your site because a well-written phrase will get your website high in search engine results on your site’s topic.
You should have your three to four most crucial keywords or phrases in your title tag. Begin your sentence with the most significant, and you can repeatedly insert these words in your sentence to highlight their importance. If I wanted to attract people to a site offering cheap web design, I might try the following:
Put aside sales pitches and brand names for elsewhere on your site. While natural to want to put your own company’s name front and center, if you’re not Coca Cola, no one is searching for you in particular. The most important thing is the keywords they’re looking for, and those should go into your title tag. Use other parts of your page to highlight your brand name. That’s what your logo is for! If your company’s name done have keywords in it, for example, that Acme Web Design Company, then those can go in your title tag, but they still may not belong right up front. Also remember, the title tag shouldn’t have your sales pitch. Hold the flowery language for later, as long as they’re not going to show up in search terms for your offerings.
Include a word that highlights your niche or region in the title tag. You won’t get far trying to compete on “web design” but if Acme Web Design Company is in Columbus, Ohio, you could make much better progress using a title tag like “Web Design, Columbus, Ohio: Low Cost Web Design in Columbus, Ohio by The Acme Web Design Company”
Your title tag might be longer than seems natural to you. Some people do say that your title must be under 70 characters. They’re right that only the first 70 characters appear in a browser’s header bar, but search engine’s robots do scan your whole tag and search engines have not problem with reading more than 70 characters. Look at key sites in competitive fields for examples of title tags that exceed those lengths. Choose a tag that matches your need to get important words in a sentence that maximizes your ability to describe what your site offers.
Even in a very long title tag, you can’t fit all the search words someone might want to use to find your site. You can alternate title tags within your site to work around this problem. Instead of labeling your services page “services” our web design site could go with “low cost, web design services”. “Contact” could be replaced with a header re-emphasizing our company’s geographical location, et cetera. A lot of sites do make this error and use identical title tags on each of the inner pages of a website. Don’t make this mistake this yourself. Use each page’s title to make one more plug for your key words and phrases.
