The first step of creating the page is the Title Tag.
Title Tags !
The first step in creating a webpage is to provide a “Title Tag”. Without it , just pack up your laptop and find another hobby or job.
The title tag is the most important piece of real estate on your site as far as the search engines are concerned. So don’t blow it by just making it your domain name. A title tag could be as long as you want, but you only have about 60 characters before the search engines stop using the text and moves on to other elements on the page.
Since the title appears as the anchor text in the link in the SERPs pages ,it must be filled with the most important , relevant, and eye-catching information that you can come up with.
Keywords
People who type in specific words into the search engines , expect the engines to give results that match their original query. We know that the search engines look at over 200 different signals in their algorithm to decide the result of any page against the keyword searched. The title tag is the most important factor. You don’t necessarily need your keyword in the title tag for it to come up in the search results, but it helps a great deal.
As you can see from the image, the term searched for was in the title tag and because of good SEO techniques, ranked not only #1 in the search result, But outranked the actual company that makes the item searched ! And imagine all those e-commerce sites that have that specific search term ” Nike Air Max 90 “. Where are they in the picture? Just below the result again.
Gripping.
The next thing your title tag has to be is gripping, take your audience and totally grab them, hook, line and sinker. We just showed you how to make it more likely to be clicked simply by putting keywords in it, but that itself is only the beginning.
The trick is to make sure that the title tag is both keyword rich and compelling. This will help move your site to the top of the rankings, but also make sure that visitors are more likely to click on it into your site. Mix your keywords with other close terms for that same object or term, just as in the example above. Try to keyword spam it without looking spammy. I know that’s more of an art than science, but the best form to use is just check out the title tags of other sites and see how they use it to drive clicks to their sites. Also from our other post, use the Meta Descriptions to it’s full value as discussed in the post.
Avoid Common mistakes
Creating and placing your title tags properly is crucial to ensuring they are effective. Without it, the content on the page just has it’s value reduced by a lot. Here are a few common issues:
Same on Every Page: Each page in your site is unique. This means your title tags to be unique on each page as well. On a lot of sites you’ll see the same title tag across all the pages “Welcome to My Site, We are so-and-so.com “or something like that. That hardly describes the page at all, and at that point, the spiders crawling your page will most likely flag it as a useless page and a waste of resources to crawl it. Go through your site and customize each title, ensuring it uniquely and accurately describes the content of the page.
Leading with Business Name: There are good reasons to have your business name present in your title tag, but that should not be by default. If you use your business name be sure to think through the reasoning and make sure it’s sound. The best possible position for your Business name should be at the end of the sentence, broken by a | entry.
For example : Air Max 90 Shoes | KicksOnFire.com — That would a great textbook form of a simple title tags. it gives the searcher best of both worlds.
List of Keywords: Avoid placing your keywords in the title tag to just try to throw as many in there as you possible can. “Cars | Autos | GPS | Sports Cars | Car Shows.” Of course that gets all your keywords in there, but it does nothing to make someone want to click on the result and visit your site. Remember, the best way to drive traffic to your site is not just the home page, you should have a page for each keyword that your targeting in a separate area from the home page. Remember, if you have a good landing page, that is optimized for that particular keyword, then users will no doubt go to your home page, stay on your site longer and reduce the bounce rate number of your site. This in turn will make your site a better user exerience, and the search engines will notice and reward your site for it.
Lack of Description: Aside from getting your primary keywords in the title, and making it compelling, you also have to make sure the title tag provides enough of a description of the content to make sure it gets a targeted click. There is more on using proper descriptions on another post here on using meta descriptions.
Remember , use title tags all the time, on every page, and make them unique with great keywords that is associated with the content on your page.