Powerful titles for your website for SEO
Possibly one of the easiest SEO fixes, but one of the most commonly overlooked, the title tag is a determining factor in how search engines view your page. The title tag is like the name of a book printed on its cover: no author would have an untitled cover because the book will never be found, yet there are millions of untitled web pages.
The main reason why the title is important is that search engines place considerable importance on your content in determining where the page should appear in the search results. In some cases, the title may be more important than the content of the page in determining its meaning. Consequently, the title should communicate keywords and ranking relevance to help ensure the page is indexed correctly in the first place.
The second main reason is that a page title is copied directly into the first line of any search result, so in order for a visitor to click on the result, it must be relevant to their search. The search terms that the user has entered in their query will appear in bold in the title, so the more terms that match, the more attention will be drawn to the title.
To optimize appeal to both search engines and potential visitors, the ideal title tag has the following attributes:
keyword phrases– Unless you have a well-known brand, most visitors will search using topical keywords rather than your company name directly. You need to make sure that the search terms most likely to find your content appear in the page title.
Company name– Your brand should appear in the page title, although you may receive more traffic if it appears after keyword phrases (eg, “Bay Area Accountant – Beswick Accounting”).
Brief and descriptive– Don’t spam the title with repetitive keyword phrases and keep the length to 10-12 words max. Search engines prefer shorter titles, and visitors will look for relevance in the title, ignoring unnecessarily long sentences.
Unique– Search engines look at pages, not sites, so for best results, each page should have a different title, optimized for the keywords of that particular page.
How to change the title of a web page
In an HTML file, the title meta tag is in the header:
<br /> <HEAD><br /> <TITLE>One Uproar – Web design, SEO SEM and Social Media for your business</TITLE><br /> </HEAD>
In the example above, the title appears on the first line of the search results and will appear in the title bar of most browsers.
Web page editing programs will often display the title tag as part of the page properties. The ideal length for a title tag is less than 70 characters, although Google will read the entire title tag and truncate the longest ones (especially if the search terms are at the end of the title). For best results, you should stay under 70 characters, as your goal is to immediately convey what the page is about.
Placing search keywords towards the beginning of the title tag can sometimes lead to more clicks; it is worth trying different titles to see if the company or keywords first works best. Don’t forget that you are also writing titles to sell your pages and invite click through, so the title needs to be attractive to human readers and not just search engines. You should look at the HTML of every page on your site and immediately fix any that have missing or unhelpful titles.
The title tag is also used as a title for bookmarks. If a user bookmarks your page and it doesn’t have a useful reference, it’s likely they won’t come back through the bookmark again. This is another good reason to make sure your title is compelling and different for each page.