Title tags are definitely the homerun hitters for SEO. With well-optimized title tags, almost any site has a shot at ranking better…
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Title Tag SEO Tips
Posted by: Nathan, March 11, 2009
Looking for a quick fix that will improve your rankings? Take a look at your title tags. A title tag is the line of text that is normally displayed at the top of the browser window. Title tags are arguably the most important SEO tags for any site.
For most search engines, the maximum length of a title tag to be displayed is between 60-70 characters. If your title tag is over 70 characters, your title will be cut off around 70 characters on the search results page.
Search engine spiders use these title tags as the main source for determining the page topic. Spiders or crawlers examine the title and then translate the topic of the page. This is one reason why it is always best to use your keywords in the page title, and to place them as close to the beginning of the title as possible. Remember, the text included in the title tag is also the text that will appear in the SERPs (search engine results pages) as the linked title on which users will click to access your page. In fact, just fixing the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and significant improvements in your rankings.
For example, let’s say you have an educational site that provides information and guidelines on teacher certification requirements. You’ve decided that the most important keywords for your site are “teaching certification” and “teaching requirements.” In this case, a page title along the lines of “Teaching Requirements for Teacher Certification” is highly relevant to the topic of the site. Spiders will crawl your site, and because the title is the first factor it sees, the spider will “read” it and then examine the rest of the page finding the keywords used in other places on the page to determine how relevant the title is to the rest of the content. If the content, H tags, and title tag all relate—you’re in business! This is why it’s so important to target the most critical keywords in the title tag.
Follow this same process for all of your pages, and remember to create unique titles that are relevant to each page and do not keyword stuff. This greatly improves the effectiveness of those tags and will increase the search engine rankings for your keywords. Although your home page might show up for 20 or 30 different keyword combinations, only your top two or three keyword phrases should be included in the tittle.
Posted by: Nathan
17 Comments
Nice job on the basics. If you’re on WordPress, look for the All in One SEO plugin. If you’re on Typepad, too bad …
Good post. I think people forget about Title Tags many times but it is huge in how your site gets indexed. I used to be one of them but now when I create sites, it’s one of the first things I optimize 
@MatthewLoop
Title tag and description still hold its value. While writing these tags we must make sure that our content revolves around these tags. Tags are nothing but gist of that particular page.
Best article really defining the importance of Title tags, but most people ignore them or give then little weight.
Good job.
Really title tags are exceptionally important as it is the title which carry your link in search results…because it is the first thing people see about your site.
Great post that clearly defines the basics and importance of the title tag! I would also point out that the age of a site defintely helps when tweaking the title tag – I’ve worked on sites that are 10-13 years old. With just a few small changes to the title tag I’ve beeen able to rank for some very competitive phrases within a few weeks! Newer sites might take a bit longer to reap the benefits of improving your title tag.
Title tags are critical…period. Talking about the homepage specifically, you want to find keywords that have huge demand and very little competition then implement the keywords into the title tag of your homepage. I never use more than 10 words (keywords) in the title tag.
It is the teaser to get someone to click on your link. The title tag is similar to the ppc ad title and has the same function to get the user to click on your listing.
I recently started to use SEOtitle tags plugin because of how important the title tag is. Thanks for the write up I enjoyed it.
Great article. Just wanted to know the reason for changing one of the keywords here from “teaching certification” to “Teacher Certification”.
You’ve decided that the most important keywords for your site are “teaching certification” and “teaching requirements.” In this case, a page title along the lines of “Teaching Requirements for Teacher Certification” is highly relevant to the topic of the site.
Thanks for this great info. I have used it on two of my sites so far. I really appreciate it!
There are some nice SEO plugins that really help you get some extra millage out of your title tag. I currently am using the “all in one SEO plugin”, and it does a very good job for me. Furthermore, I manually remove stop words from the WordPress permalink, and that seems to help to get the posts to rank in the search engines. There are a couple of plugins that actually do that for you if you are running WordPress. I think one of them is called, “SEO post link”.
I also have had a sub title plugin made that gives you an extra SEO edge. It is call “sub title plus”. If you are interested, please check it out on my blog.
Great info. There are other proponents of putting navigation type of information on title tags as well. When the home page is about “Certification”, and the Topic is “Teaching Requirements for Teacher Certification” the title would be “Certification – Teaching Requirements for Teacher Certification”.
In your opinion would this be keyword stuffing, now that “Certification” and “Teach(er|ing)” are appearing twice?
Another variation is to invert the order of the navigation type path so the title become ‘Topic – Home Page’. Is this a preferred order noting that the topic could be longer than the 60 to 70 characters and could be truncated visually for the search engine user.
They really define the importance of the importance of title tags and encourage people to give importance to it. I will surely try it with my site. I will post here the result of my implementation.
Thanks for the article, but can someone please tell should we have title tag and page title (header) exactly same?
I personally feel NO. Because in the title tag we might want to add 2-3 keywords and in the page title (header) may be just one.
Please clarify.
Is it suggested to add all the top keywords in the title tag?
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