What is a Title Tag?A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. It is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content) and appears in three key places:
SEO Best Practice
The title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content. This element creates value in three specific areas (covered below) and is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization:
Relevancy
Creating a descriptive, keyword-laden title tag is important for increasing rankings in search engines. The screen shot below comes from SEOmoz's survey of 37 influential thought leaders in the SEO industry on the search engine ranking factors. In that survey, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword usage in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.
As title tags are such an important part of search engine optimization, implementing best practices for title tags makes for terrific low-energy, high-impact SEO tasks. The recommendations below cover the critical parts of optimizing title tags for search engine and usability goals:
Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title TagAccording to SEOmoz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results (See below).
SEO Best Practice
The title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content. This element creates value in three specific areas (covered below) and is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization:
Relevancy
Creating a descriptive, keyword-laden title tag is important for increasing rankings in search engines. The screen shot below comes from SEOmoz's survey of 37 influential thought leaders in the SEO industry on the search engine ranking factors. In that survey, 35 of the 37 participants said that keyword usage in the title tag was the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.
As title tags are such an important part of search engine optimization, implementing best practices for title tags makes for terrific low-energy, high-impact SEO tasks. The recommendations below cover the critical parts of optimizing title tags for search engine and usability goals:
Be Mindful of Length 70 characters is the maximum amount of characters that will display in the search results (the engines will show an ellipsis - "..." to indicate that a title tag has been cut off).
Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title TagAccording to SEOmoz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results (See below).
The 70 character limit is a great guideline for direct SEO benefit, but you should also remember that words that are used after that limit could also have an indirect positive benefit on search engine rankings. A lot of sites out there scrape other pages and use Title tag content as the anchor text. If any particular scraper site had some link importance (PageRank when talking about Google), then the additional words you use in the Title could help. With all that said, we still recommend the 12 word maximum overall.
Length and Keyword Usage Guidelines
Once you have figured out how to update the Title tags on your site, you will then have to determine what specific keywords you want to focus on within them. It is extremely important that every page utilizes the highest priority keyword phrase in its Title. However, you should strive to maximize the value of every Title tag by using additional keywords relevant to the page.
In general, Title tags should be no more than 12 words in length. Some SEOs will suggest using each individual word only once in a Title tag, but we recommend a more flexible maximum of two usages for any word. With that said, you should avoid repeating keywords unless you are trying to target a slightly different keyword phrase. In other words, do not repeat keywords just for the sake of repeating them. You should only repeat words if you are trying to optimize the page for multiple phrases that share some words but there is no way to string them together as one phrase.
An important point to make regarding Title tags is that Google does not have a maximum number of words that it will read in a Title – they have a maximum number of characters. That maximum number of characters is 70. Any words that end beyond that 70 character limit will not be counted as Title tag content for ranking purposes by Google. Please note that we said ends beyond the character limit. A six-letter word that begins at character 68, for example, will get cut off because it ends beyond 70 characters.
Example:
You own a site that sells Book. You have a landing page for Mazhar Made books store. You want to optimize the page for "book stores", "Mazhar Made Book Stores".
You own a site that sells Book. You have a landing page for Mazhar Made books store. You want to optimize the page for "book stores", "Mazhar Made Book Stores".
Good Title tag:
<title>Mazhar Made Book Stores: Mazhar Made Novel and Rhymes</title>
Bad Title tag:
<title>BookStore: Mazhar Made Novel and Rhymes</title>
<title>Mazhar Made Book Stores: Mazhar Made Novel and Rhymes</title>
Bad Title tag:
<title>BookStore: Mazhar Made Novel and Rhymes</title>
To sum up, here are some key things to remember when optimizing a Title tag:
- Keep the Title 12 words or less.
- High-priority phrases should be utilized within the first 70 characters of the Title tag.
- The maximum usage for any particular word is two.
- Use as many high-priority keyword phrases as you can given the recommended usage limits.
- Utilize keyword phrases in the exact way they are searched. Please note that word order is important and you should use stop words if they are commonly included in the query.
- You should use words from additional phrases if you cannot use them exactly due to the two usage maximum. The use of "Irons" in our good Title tag above is a perfect example of this strategy. We would have preferred to use "Taylor Made irons" but could not use Taylor Made an additional time.
- Make sure that keywords targeted in your page Title accurately reflect the topic of the page.
- Do not utilize keywords or phrases more than once in page Titles without a specific reason for doing so.
