Title Tag Basics

The title tag is one of the primary means by which your website is categorized and ranked by search engines. It is one of the easiest things to change on your site and also nets some of the largest benefits and is therefore one of the first items you should look at when doing search engine optimization.

The title tag is HTML code that is contained towards the top of an HTML file. The code looks like this:

The text contained in the title tag appears in two places. First, it appears in the organic or natural search engine results, and second, it appears in the upper left corner of your browser.

In this case, the search term I typed into Google was SEO Utah. You’ll notice that Google bolds the words Utah and SEO when it lists the results. This makes it easy for you to scan a page and see where the keywords you typed in are appearing.

The basic SEO technique here is to make sure that the title tags on your website contain your keywords. However, you also have to bear in mind that human beings will see this text, so it needs to make some sense to them as well. The trick then becomes to write title tag content that is human-friendly, accurately represents the content on the page, and also contains the keywords you want that page to rank for.

If you’re new to SEO, your first thought might be that if I want my site to rank well for SEO Utah, why don’t I just put the words “SEO Utah” in the title tag a hundred times? Because that’s what is known as search engine abuse, and if you abuse Google, Google will give you a spanking, and you don’t want to be spanked by Google. In addition, Google only looks at the first 70 characters in a title tag, so there’s no reason to put a huge list of keywords in your title tags.

Here are what I would consider the most important basics:

1. Use up to 70 characters, including spaces. As I mentioned, Google only looks at the first 70 characters, so anything you put in the title tag that goes past this limit will be ignored. This generally means you’ve got space for 5-6 words.

2. Use keywords and keyword phrases effectively. If you only have room for 5-6 words, you’ve got to make the space count. Learn how to use words efficiently and get rid of words like “and”, “is”, “with” and other filler words that take up space but are ignored by search engines.

3. Relevancy. Your title tag should be an accurate description of the content contained on the webpage. People make decisions to click on a link in Google based heavily on the text in the title tag. If they click on that and then find a webpage that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the title tag, they’ll quickly leave.

One good way to ensure your visitors experience relevancy quickly is to use the exact phrasing in your title tag as the visible headline on your page. For example, the logical title tag for a newspaper article would be whatever the title of the article is. That way, the visitor would see immediately upon clicking through from a search engine that the page they’ve reached is exactly what they were expecting to find.

To summarize, use 4-6 words in each title tag on your site and use keywords that are relevant to the page. Making this simple change will give you big results.

Here are some other resources related to title tags:

Best Practices for Title Tags
Don’t let your title tags do this – HTML Page Titles & Usability
Does Title Tag Need To Come First?
Writing Search Engine Friendly Titles