Keep your title tags short and pertinent
The title tag (the description that appears on the top of the browser) of your site is one of the most important factors determining the search engine results position (SERP).
There are two common mistakes, however, the people commit when creating the title tag. The first one is to use a single title, usually the blog name, for all the pages throughout the site. This must be avoided because the title of a page should match the content inside it.
Suppose you are using the title “John Doe’s Blog” on all the pages. Even if you have a post talking about “The New PlayStation 3” the title tag for this post will be “John Doe’s Blog”, which is not very effective (because there is no match on the keywords). A much better title would be “The New PlayStation 3”, that is exactly equal to the post name rather than the blog name.
The second mistake that people commit is to include too many keywords on the title tag, hoping that search engines will take all of them into consideration. Have you ever seen a title like this: “Tech Blog – where you find resources for blogs, websites, technology, internet, applications, software, hardware, and pretty much everything else!”
This should also be avoided because search engines put a value on title keywords depending on the total number of keywords. The result is that the higher the number of keywords you have on the title the smaller the value that will be attributed to each one of them.
A good title tag, therefore, should be short (no more than 4 or 5 keywords) and pertinent to the content inside the page.
Update: You can find the actual code I use on the article “Optimal Title Tag for WordPress“.
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14 Responses to “Keep your title tags short and pertinent”
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Bang Kritikus
How to put a tag in blogspot ??
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Simon
This is a great article, thank you. One thing I would add to it would be that relevancy is huge if you want to use your title tag effectively. You can’t just pick a title tag based on the keywords that you want to rank for if it doesn’t match the content of your article.
If you want your page to rank well for a specific phrase, the first thing you need to do is write a unique, useful article about that topic. Only then should you base your title tag around those keywords, otherwise your topic won’t be relevant and you won’t rank.
Title tags can play a huge role in a strong SEO rankings – but not on their own and they must be part of a bigger picture which includes quality content. As the old saying goes, content is king!
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SEO Genius
Good article however i feel that a title tag is limited to 65 characters and also that many people who want to rank for “Long tail keywords” can benefit more from longer title tags.
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nrtjaykvty
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Daniel
No they don’t, provided you are not talking about dynamic URLs.
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Sunil
I have a question?
Does punctuation (like question mark)in titles play a part in Searchability of the article or a web site? -
Thilak
One thing I noticed in the past is that Title with appealing words attract comments, but it doesn’t drive organic traffic
Good post 😉
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Daniel
i think that the name of the site is a good title for the home page, another alternative title for the home page could be a couple of keywords that you are aiming for search results
as far as single post pages i would remove the name of the blog altogether, remember that the smaller the number of words the higher their value, so having only the name of the post as title should maximize the probability of being picked by search engines for this particular post
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Bes
Really good point! I used to have the main site name as the main and beginning title tag of every page. Changing that a while back has seen better results.
Do you think the name of the site itself [like “The Tony Wheel Blog”, for example] should be included at all? For example, how about having the title of the post as the title of the page, following by the name of the blog?
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