You could be an excellent writer but if you fail to drive traffic to your written page then the end result becomes pointless. The title of your page is the entry point to your site, much like the store front for your business. A poorly done store front can actually push people away from your business, and your page’s title can do the same if you aren’t careful.
Why Your Title Is Important
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – An article is written for its audience but read by humans and robots at the same time. Robots help in passing the message to us in different ways but they are not as smart as humans to understand everything. They see patterns, keywords, sequences, length, etc to score a page. A well-written title will be optimized for search engines so it can appeal to being scanned by robots and then searched for by humans. Understanding how robots and humans alike will see your data is very important.
Exp: See how people type in “chicago cars pre owned” in Google to find some information.
- Click Through Rate (CTR) – Online readers just scan a web page before they completely read everything. Here your talent matters in writing a best title to increase the click through. See the result set in the google, page ranking first can have less click through based on the number of keywords found in the title.
- Relevancy – A title should have lots of relevancy with the page content, if you miss that then search engines will figure it out easily and will not rank the page well for terms. It is also more likely a visitor will hit the back button and leave the page as he/she reads through the page. Exp: “Jeep Dealers Chicago – Mancari Chrysler Jeep Dealerships Offering Used Cars, New Jeeps, Chryslers to Chicago and all Chicagoland in Illinois”
You see something different when you land on the page. The first word PreOwned does not appear until halfway down so there is a chance users will hit back button before reaching the point. Many experts consider well thought out page positioning and relevancy to be the most important part of a page.
Best Practices to Write a Title Tag
- You can write a title tag as lengthy as you want but best practice is to limit it to 70 Characters.
Exp: Here is a longer title that is cut short when showed on serp.
- Use Keywords in the title that is used in the page content, it’s a good idea to use your most targeted keyphrases is at the starting. Exp: Here is an example of branding done in the middle of the title, I prefer not to have branding in internal pages of the website. If you still want to brand your pages then use it at the end of the title.
- Try to use long tail phrases, I like it because you will start ranking for the phrase sooner than shorter phrase and over the time you can build back links on shorter terms to rank well in search engines. Never forget the competition for ranking increases as you drill down to shorter terms. Exp: 2005 Honda Pre Owned Cars in Chicago – Used Cars in Chicago
- For multi phrase titles, you should use hyphens to separate them as it is also most widely used in the internet. Other dividers are |, >, >> and you need to test your pages which converts best for you.
Where Else You Should Use the Title on a Page
- Use it once in H1 tag. The big size letters that you see on the top of the page should be in the H1 tag so use it once there, normally it is called the page header.
- Use keywords from the title in your meta description, this will help click throughs and a is great boost for SEO.
- Use it in url (page path), will help it to rank well in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). You can make a dash separated version of the title to use as the page url.
Exp: 2005-honda-pre-owned-cars-in-chicago-used-cars-in-chicago.htm
- Use it at least once in the page content.
- Use the keywords from the title for internal links.
- Use it in keyword tag (low priority).
I covered pretty much everything about the importance of web page title tag, if you think I missed anything then leave me a comment here and I will update the post with that.
