Title tags are probably one of the most ignored yet most powerful search engine optimization (SEO) tools out there. How many times have you gone to a website’s home page and seen that their title tag is “HOME”? It’s actually quite sad how often this little SEO gem is ignored.
First of all, let’s cover what a title tag actually is. When you go to a webpage, you’ll see a little tab at the very top (not even on the actual page) that resembles the tab on an old manila file folder. This tab will have a title which typically isn’t completely visible unless you hold your cursor on it. This is your title tag.
Now, if you think back to file cabinets and the old file tabs we used to label for organization, you see how they correlate to the title tags today. They tell the search engines how and where to categorize your file or webpage. Every single webpage gets a title tag, so don’t think you’ve done your job by just writing a stellar home page tag.
Title tags have actually gone through a little update in the world of Google. Where you once had about 70 characters to express yourself and cram in all the keywords you could that related to that particular page, you only have about 60 characters today. If you noticed that I used the word “about”, know that it was entirely intentional. Google’s standard title tag is based on pixels, not characters, so thinner font characters like a lower case L are smaller than wide letters like the upper case M. This isn’t a huge change, but if you were holding your city location until the end of the title tag, it may now have dropped off and has lost its relevance.
This brings us to the organization of your title tags. You want to express what the page is by using keywords and placing the most popular keywords – or the most important ones – near the beginning. Remember when we first looked at the tags and we saw that on your standard screen only the very beginning shows until you hover your cursor? This is why you want the most vital words first.
While it’s important to get those keywords across—typically who you are, what your page does/is, where you are—you should not resort to keyword stuffing. Title tags serve as a heading on searches. When you see the meta description of the result pages for your query, the title tag is at the top. Make that as reader friendly as possible, while quickly adding those keywords.
Bad Title Tag: Jim’s Cars Home Page
*Note how this doesn’t really tell you anything at all about the page you’re going to visit. The only information you can safely gather is that it has something to do with cars.
Another Bad Title Tag: Jim’s Cars | Vintage Cars | Old Cars | Automobiles | Old Autos | Antique Cars
*Note that this tag is filled with keywords and while you know a bit more about Jim’s Cars, you still don’t really know much except that he knows a whole lot of different ways to say “old cars”.
Good Title Tag: Jim’s Cars | Minneapolis MN | Vintage Car Collections | Auto Museum
*Now look how useful and informative this title tag is. It tells you the name of the company, where it is and what you can expect to find there.
If you’re interested in learning more about title tags, good SEO practices, and how to optimize your site, contact Filament. We’d love to help.
