Your Title Tag – Your Little Piece of Gold
May 22, 2008
This post was inspired by a conversation with someone yesterday who is doing their own online marketing on their own business sites.They were asking about changing the title tag once Google had cashed the page – and changing it every time the page was cashed – well don’t – this does not help for search engine optimisation.
Your title tag is the strongest individual page element – once you get it right leave it alone. Changing the title tag can cause the page to be indexed for something different every time, if you are not competing in a very competitive market. If you are competing in a very competitive market it can mean that you are not getting listed in Google’s index for anything.
Example:
Using the phrase “SEO” in your title will help you get listed for SEO, after a while as it is a very competitive search term, assuming other parts are in place. However if you keep changing this to “Search Engine Marketing” or Web Marketing” – you run the risk of not being listed in Google index for any of the terms. Google loves age: age of pages and age of domains.
By all means play around with your title tag until you get it right but once you do leave it alone. The title for this post will never change completely; it is unlikely to even get tweaked.
How do I know if I have the title tag right?
Look at your statistics and see what search phrases people are using to find the page. This should be congruent with the page. Check Google webmaster tools or some other tool and find out if you are being listed for the search terms that are part of your title tags. And most importantly is your title tag the phrase you want to be found for? This last part should have been part of your keyword research and competitive analysis.
The last point on the title tag is length. I come across many sites that have titles that go across the top of my browser. This is far too long – the title should be no more than 12 words, if those twelve words are so long that Google is cutting off the title in the search results reduce again until the full title shows in the page results – the reason for this is spam, your title looks too much like spam to Google and that will reduce the possibilities for that page.
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Hi Leslie, I have being trying to keep my page titles to conform with some SEO advise I came across on Google. Is this good page title practice?
Regards
Patrick
No more than 63 characters so they appear in full in all browser windows. This 63 character counts includes spaces.
Include a keyword or key phrase in the title tag that is relevant & relates to the page content.
Each title tag must be unique and relevant to the page content.
Title tag should be a summary of the page content.
@patrick
Keep them to no more than about 70 including spaces – 67 will show, but it is okay to go a little over sometimes. Yes, have keywords, but don’t stuff make it for people not just search engines. Yes to unique and show indicate the content of the page.