DAY 12: Mastering The Title Tag
by Tyrone on March 19, 2010 - 5 comments
“There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply.â€
- Josh Billings -
A bit for your visitors, a lot for the search engines
Once you got your site structure right, the one piece of SEO that is the most important when it comes to on-page optimization is without the shadow of a doubt the Page Title.
Although the Page Title is originally designed to tell your visitors what your page is all about, in practice, it’s much more to tell the search engines what your page is all about.
What is a Title Tag?
Do not confuse the Title Tag, and the Post Title or Content Title.
The Title Tag is the header line of text that is returned in the search engines result pages:
And on top of your browser window:
While the Post Title or Content Title, are only visible on the page itself and in <header> tags.
The Title Tag is a piece of information that tells both your visitors and the search engines what is the topic of your page.
The information should be enclosed by the <title> and </title> tags within the <head> tags in the HTML code of your page.
When it comes to SEO, keep in mind that since each title describes a specific page, they each should be absolutely unique.
Why is it important to optimize for the Title Tag?
Like I just told you, or you may already know, the title tag is the most important on-page optimization factor for you.
The search engines primarily identify the content of your page based on the Title you are using. If your title contains or matches the search query of a user, then you are much more likely to rank high for that search term.
Not only do you increase your chances of ranking better for that search term, the search engines have a very neat feature that bold their search query in the results listed on the result page.
That means, if you have the keyword the person is looking for in your Title, description, and URL, they all will be bolded, and trust me; this draws even more attention to your listing!
The purpose of this search engine feature is to help the users recognize if the page returned is likely to be relevant to their search.
How to optimize your Page Title
I will start with what is considered the good practices for general purpose of the page title:
- Accurately describe the page content. Don’t write a page title that’s got nothing to do with what will be on that page.
- Save yourself and your potential visitors from a dreadful “Untitled†or “New Page 1â€.
- Each Title Tag must be unique. Your pages are different so
must be your titles. This is how Google differentiate your pages, if they all have the same title then it’s just one page, and Google will only index one, you really don’t want that to happen to you and your site. - Use short but descriptive titles. If your title is more than 70 characters in length, Google will truncated it and it’s not going to look too good for you.
- Don’t write long and unhelpful titles for the users. Not only your title will be truncated, no one will benefit from an unhelpful title, the search engines won’t know what your page is about, the users won’t be interested in visiting that page, and you won’t benefit either from a SEO point of view.
- Don’t just stuff unneeded keywords there either. Cluttering unneeded keywords in your page Title works more against you than for you. Abuse of keyword stuffing is a spammer trademark, you wouldn’t want to be labeled as such.
Ok, now that the great lines are clear for you, let’s move on to the real SEO stuff.
Do you remember in Part 1 of this 21 Days SEO Mastery course, you learned how to group your keywords strategically.
This is a process that should apply for each of your pages, in fact if you can it’s even better in you can repeat the entire Keyword research process by targeting your page content only, in the end, you are likely to end up with 3 types of keywords:
- Global niche concept for the post.
- Highly relevant keywords.
- Sub-related keywords.
Let’s take my recent post “Google Keyword Density SEO Tutorial†as example once again; so following those precepts, here’s what I came up with:
- “Keyword Density†would be my concept, but it’s too broad to be targeted for my post. (By the way, I now rank #14 for this term worth 32,000 searches monthly; after 2 weeks of publishing the post)
- “Keyword Density SEO†and “Google Keyword Density†are both on target for me from a search volume, relevancy, and difficulty stand. They will be my highly relevant keywords.
- “Keyword Density Tutorialâ€, “Calculate Keyword Densityâ€,
“Optimal Keyword Densityâ€, “Optimum Keyword Densityâ€, and “Keyword Density Percentage†are all sub-related keywords, they are on-topic with my current post, but don’t generate sufficient traffic volume to be primary keywords. Nonetheless, their search volume is still consequent enough to have it returned in Keywords searches and suggestions on the search engines.
If I was a moron, I would want to write a page title like:
“Keyword Density, Keyword Density SEO, Google Keyword Density, Keyword Density Tutorial, Calculate Keyword Density, Optimal Keyword Density, Optimum Keyword Density, Keyword Density Percentage.”
Now don’t laugh! There are many people who are doing this and think they are smart.
So, can you tell me what’s wrong with this title?
- Obviously it’s way too long, well over the 70 characters limit.
- I’m not sure it’s very appealing to the human visitors.
- I kind of repeat “keyword density†way too much in my opinion.
How can we correct this?
The title should contain what is the most important and relevant to your page content, so I’ll start by looking at my main keywords: “keyword densityâ€, “keyword density SEOâ€, and “Google keyword densityâ€.
Obviously, “keyword density†is repeated in each of those keywords, so I don’t need to mention it by itself in the title as it will be automatically optimized for through any of the other main keywords.
We are now left with “keyword density seo†and “google keyword densityâ€; again I feel that there’s too much repetition here, so I’m going to blend them into one sentence:
“Google Keyword Density SEOâ€
Not the greatest copyrighting, but it:
- still make sense
- is highly related to my content
- is optimized for my 3 main keywords
Now, with only 26 characters in use, and considering I have more keywords for this page (you may not have, but if you do, this could be interesting for you), let’s make good use of the remaining characters space.
Just like I did with my main keywords, I’ll try to concatenate the remaining ones into a sentence.
Based on the keyword difficulty analysis, I’m pretty sure that if I add “Keyword Density Tutorial†in my page title, I’ll get a top ranking or at least a first page ranking. (I actually have a double listing #1 and #2 for it now)
Obviously I can’t have “Optimal Keyword Density†and “Optimum Keyword Density†together in the page title, so I’ll go with the one with the most searches: “Optimal Keyword Densityâ€
So let’s see what kind of sentence I could come up with:
“Calculate Optimal Keyword Density Percentage Tutorialâ€
Actually that’s quite good, although “calculate keyword density†is split, the proximity is still close so it’s still highly relevant, and the same goes for “keyword density tutorialâ€.
So let’s put my Page Title together:
“Google Keyword Density SEO – Calculate Optimal Keyword Density Percentage Tutorialâ€
That’s looking pretty sharp, except for the fact that I’m in excess of
character use…
“Calculate Keyword Density†has one of lowest search volume so I’m going to remove it.
My title now looks like this:
“Google Keyword Density SEO – Optimal Keyword Density Percentage Tutorialâ€
I still can see that I have one word too many here… I have to choose between “Percentage†and “Tutorialâ€.
Though choice, “keyword density percentage†has much more search volume than “keyword density tutorialâ€; however “keyword density tutorial†is child play to optimize for.
Here’s my decision:
“Google Keyword Density SEO – Optimal Keyword Density Tutorialâ€
Since it’s a new page, I need traffic and ranking quick, this is what I can get for sure by optimizing for the easy keyword.
Later on, once my authority is established through increased offpage optimization, I’ll be able to change my page title to:
“Google Keyword Density SEO – Optimal Keyword Density Percentageâ€
At that time, I still should maintain my rank #1 for “keyword density tutorialâ€, yet now being able to increase my optimization power for “keyword density percentage†too.
Exercise
Make sure that each of the page title for your new site is highly optimized the way I just showed you.
That step alone will dramatically affect your search engine ranking because we follow 3 simple on-page optimization rules:
- Keyword density: our keywords are well present, but not overwhelming (no over-optimization here).
- Keyword proximity: our main keyword is surrounded by closely related keywords.
- Keyword prominence: our main keywords appear first and at the top of the page, first to be read by the search engines.
If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.
My name is Tyrone Shum and I'm on a journey to outsource and automate my business to allow me to work only 12 hours a week. On this website I share with you my outsourcing strategies to achieve this goal and I have a passion to teach others about what I do. Read more 
Hi All,
I’m getting conflicting feedback about keeping the Title tag different from the H1 tag. Some say it’s not a good idea to have them be the same, and others disagree and say having them the same is fine. I’ve also heard that if they need to be similar or the same, then make sure the H2 tag follows the H1 tag with unique content.
Would love to hear your feedback and if you have any examples to share, or successes or un-successes. Would like to see some articles around this topic.
Thanks!
Good basic title optimization tutorial. I agree with pretty much everything you are saying. If you find that a page has too many relevant keywords that you want to include in the title, it may be best to create additional pages on your site to target those keywords separately. If you try to target too many keywords with the same page, it will be very tough to rank well for all of those keywords.
One point that wasn’t really mentioned is that you should try to include your most important keyword phrase towards the beginning of the title tag. The closer to the beginning of the title tag, the more weight the search engines put on this phrase.
Good point there. That one I agree with you that you should put the important phrases at the beginning as search engines do give more weight on them.
Thanks.
I’ve placed my main keyword first in my title tag followed by the | then my second keyword phrase. It’s good to know that I’m on the right track. I’ll take a look at your other post on keyword density to get a more indepth understanding. Great post!
That’s great Jarrod. You are on the right track and some people have mistakenly just put their blog title there instead. If you can utilitise the title tag with your keywords, I would highly recommend doing that instead of putting your blog title there. It’s better for SEO.
Keep up the great work!