SEO Ideas for Website Page Titles

Effective HTML Page Titles

 

Writing effective page HTML "titles" for each web page on your website is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve search engine visibility.  That said, page titles are one of a dozen basics you should implement on each web page if you want to have optimal placement in organic search.

How do you know what is set for the page title on a web page?

 

There are two ways to see the page title that is programmed into a web page.  The first is the easiest.  Look at the top bar of your browser and see what text is on the box.   See graphic below for the text that is highlighted in the green rectangle:

Creating HTML Title Tags for SEO

This example is using Internet Explorer 7.0 and the text reads "SEO Consultants New Jersey - Organic Internet Marketing - Web Design ".  This is the title tag. 

You can also "right-click" with your mouse on any HTML web  page and select "View Source" from the popup menu. Look for the line at the top of the page that reads "<TITLE>" for the programmed text. A title tag is shown in red below as an example below.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>SEO Consultants New Jersey - Organic Internet Marketing - Web Design</title>
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" />

Best Practices in Creating HTML Page Titles

 

Since you can write anything you want in page titles, we have created some do's and don'ts for effective title writing.  Keep in mind that you should also look at the page titles of websites that rank ahead of you for important search phrases.  If they rank ahead of you for a specific search phrase they are doing something right.  Page titles are a good place to start to look why people rank ahead of you.

  1. A good page title utilizes the space given in the browser view bar, which is approximately 70 characters.
  2. Your page title should not duplicate words if possible but in some cases you can repeat a word twice.
  3. Your page title can include misspelled words if you think they are common mistakes made everyday by your customers/patrons.
  4. Your domain name should not be included in your page title in most all cases.
  5. Your competitors website should not be in your page title or any copyrighted phrase of a competitor.
  6. Your page title should reflect the content of the page - be specific when you can.
  7. Do not put your page titles in all Capital letters.
  8. Use important keywords in your page titles but use them in abbreviated sentences and not just a list of random words.

 

Once you edit your website page titles for optimal search engine rankings, it will take a few weeks for the changes to have an effect.  You can track when Google last indexed your pages using the "cache:" command in the Google toolbar.  Once your site is cached with the new page title  data, changes in search rankings should start to be seen, as long as all the other basics are completed with the title edits.