4 Steps to SEO Friendly Web Page Titles
The title of your web page is one of the first things that a user will see when searching for your website through the search engines. Not only does it give the user an idea on what the webpage is about, but your webpage title plays an integral role toward the position of your site within the rankings. To make sure that your webpage titles are completely optimised, follow these four simple steps:
Step 1: Title Length
When your webpage is displayed within the search engine results page, a maximum of 70 characters will be displayed. If you go over 70 characters, you could find some of the title is missing and as a result it doesn’t make sense. Alternatively, with some of Google’s recent updates, they will occasionally reword your webpage title if it is too long to ensure a better user experience. If this is the case, it could prove to be very detrimental to your click-through rate.
On the other hand, make sure that your titles are not too short. Keep them between 50 and 70 characters to get the best possible click-through rate.
Step 2: Get Your Keywords in Your Titles
It is really important to include the keywords that you wish to rank well for within the titles of your webpage. For example, our homepage title at the moment is ‘SEO Company Birmingham, Web Design & Social Media – Wow Internet’. This title includes what we do, our keywords (without just spamming), and our brand name. Using this kind of format will give you the best results possible. Try to avoid just having ‘Homepage – Wow Internet’, for example, and get in some relevant keywords.
Step 3: No Dodgey HTML
One of the school-boy errors that we often see websites that are ‘trying-out’ SEO fall victim to, is that they have a lot of bad code; for example, if your website has two different HTML titles. This can confuse the search engine crawlers and cause you to either be ranked very poorly or even worse, not ranked at all.
Step 4: Keep it Fresh
Last but not least, all of your webpage titles must be unique. Each different webpage has to have its own webpage title to show that it has its own unique content. Failure to do this can result in your website being punished and leaving your potential users very confused.
Follow the above steps and you should be on your way to creating healthy, SEO friendly webpage titles that will help your website rank well within the organic search listings. Ignore them and you could find our website is losing out on a lot of potential visitors.
Hi Matthew,
I would love to get your thoughts on having a local phone number in the title tag.
One expert in local search and google places believes that putting your company phone number in the title tag helps get good rankings with blended search (both organic and google places)
They also say that Google still credits title tags longer than 60 characters. G may not show the full title tag however users are still getting credit for them even if longer than supposed to be.
Below are 3 examples that the expert mentioned above suggested I consider:
Austin Office Space 78701 | Commercial Real Estate 512-861-0525 | Search Rent and Lease Listings In Austin TX
Austin Office Space For Rent – 512-861-0525 – Find Retail and Commercial Property For Lease in Austin TX
Austin Office Space (512) 861-0525 – Find Commercial Real Estate Property For Lease in Austin Tx
What are your thoughts? I am looking for guidance on a good home page title tag to use for the website http://www.AustinTenantAdvisors.com
Obviously it needs to google and human friendly…..and be a marketing message that converts while still being able to get my keywords in there.
Hi Nathan,
I would definitely advise you not to put any phone numbers in your title tags. Google will not give you any benefits by doing this, and if anything, it could potentially damage your search engine rankings.
Yes, it is true that Google may read slightly more than the 65-70 characters of your title tag, however, the closer the keyword is to the start of the title tag, the more effective it is.
One bit of advice that I always give is to keep your title tags readable. Now what I mean by this is that they should make sense to a human, whilst also getting in your keywords. For example, a good title tag for your website’s homepage may be:
“Office Space & Commercial Property for Lease – Austin Tenant Advisors”
I hope this helps.
Matt.
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