Whenever I take on a new client who needs help with his site’s search engine performance I run through a checklist of potential problem areas, and the one of the first areas that I check are the title tags. These tags are critically important to getting found on the Web, but they’re often overlooked by inexperienced web developers or those do-it-yourself types that use free website templates.
The title tags are found in the XHTML documents that make up the pages of a website, and looks something like this:
<title>ABC Widgets Inc. — Home Page</title>.
The text that sits between the opening <title> tag and the closing </title> tag is not seen on the web page itself, but at the top of your screen in the browser bar. This text also appears as the wording in your browser’s “favorites” when you bookmark a website.
Typically, this wording contains the company’s name and the page that your on, such as illustrated above: ABC Widgets Inc. — Home Page, or ABC Widgets Inc. — Contact Us, and so on. This is how most websites are set up, and they’re passing up a valuable SEO opportunity.
The XHTML document contains the source code that the automated search engine software, known as bots, used to search or “crawl” websites in order to determine how they’re ranked. Because the Title tag resides near the top of this document and is the first text to appear on the web page, it’s the first element that is read by the bot as it crawls your page.
The title is considered a very important factor in determining where your site will be ranked, and it should contain valuable keywords. In fact, I recently got two of my customers from the third page to the first page of Google simply by changing a couple their title tags.
Unfortunately, most companies miss this opportunity entirely and only include their company name and the page name. This is poor SEO strategy. Do you want people to find your website because they’re typing in your company’s name? No! If someone enters your company name into a search engine, that’s a person who is already aware of your business and probably knows what you do.
What you want to happen is to have people find you who are looking for your business category — not your business name. And if your customers are primarily located in the same geographic area of your company, you’d want to use that to your advantage as well.
To use an example, if you’re an electrician and most of your business is in Lackawanna County Pennsylvania, you’d want someone to find your company by searching on something like electricians in Lackawanna County, or northeast PA electricians — and these are the types of keyphrases that you’d want to include in that Title tag, as so:
<title>electricians in Lackawanna County, northeast PA electricians</title>
Use the Title tag to your advantage and use words and phrases that individuals seeking your type of service or product — not your company name — would enter into a search engine. If you really want your company name to appear in the title bar of the browser and when your site is bookmarked, then put it last, e.g.:
<title>electricians in Lackawanna County, northeast PA electricians | XYZ Electrical Inc.</title>
The order in which the keywords/keyphrases appear is also important, so put the one you feel is most valuable first, the second most valuable second, and your company name last. Also, don’t stuff too many keywords into your title tag because the search engine gods frown upon that and may penalize you. Keep the total number of characters to sixty-five or less including spaces.
Another word of caution: always separate your keywords/phrase by commas or the | symbol (known as a pipe). If you don’t separate your keyphrases the search engine bots will read it as all one word, and it’s unlikely that someone will do a search on electricians in Lackawanna County northeast PA electricians.
I hope this gives you a bit of insight into search engine optimization. There’s quite a lot to the SEO business and the rules change frequently, but the Title tag has been and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, one of the more important factors in achieving a good search engine ranking. It’s not a very difficult element to change, although researching the right keywords and keyphrases are another matter. But we’ll leave that for another post.
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