Get SEO Right ... Improve Your Page Titles
Rarely do important changes present themselves as easy tasks – but this next SEO must, does just that. The page title is one of the key elements that determines a page’s rank.
The page title is the text that appears in the header of the browser when the page loads. In the HTML of the page, it’s displayed like this:
<TITLE>PageTitles.com | Pages | Titles | More</TITLE>
Here are few examples of live page titles:
1. CNN.com Page Title: CNN.com - Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather, Entertainment & Video News
2. MSNBC.com Page Title: Breaking News, Weather, Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Travel, Science, Technology, Local, US & World News - msnbc.com
3. HomeDepot.com Page Title: Shop HomeDepot.com for Appliances, Patio Furniture, Hampton Bay Lighting & Fans, Power Tools & much more
4. Lowes.com Page Title: Lowe's Home Improvement: Buy Kitchen Cabinets, Paint, Appliances & Flooring
These are pretty significant web sites, so they must have this stuff down pat, right? Well not exactly, there are some basic rules regarding page titles, and each of the sites violates at least one of them.
Page Title Tips
-
Use your top two keywords or keyword phrases (see: Research Your Keywords) that are targeted for that specific index page. Each index page should have a customized page title.
- Keep those keywords at the front. Ideally the first two phrases are assigned the most weight in a Google ranking.
-
Avoid prepositions, conjunctions and unnecessary punctuation – use “|” or “—“ instead to separate them.
-
In most cases, don’t use your site or company name in the beginning of your page title. It’s a waste of valuable character space on a term for which you probably already rank and have very little competition. Who’s gonna outrank CNN.com for the term “cnn.com”? If you must include, add it to the end of the page title.
-
Keep it under 65 characters – that’s as much as Google reads. IE only displays about 100 characters, so keep it short.
-
Don't make your page title a simple string of keywords -- this is a practice that makes you prone to being filtered by Google as autogenerated content.
-
Remember your page title will be the first thing a searcher sees, with their search terms bolded. It should convey a message that is a call to action or deliver the message you want them to understand about this page.
For more, watch this video primer on Page Title creation from SEOBook.com.
How Did Our Example Page Titles Fare?
Now, you can see CNN.com uses its site name as the first term in its page title, which is a waste of valuable page title real estate.
MSNBC.com tacks it's name on the end which is good, but the title it too long. Google only sees the first 65 characters. If their most important keywords are first it's not an issue, but keep that title short. Plus it's a string of keywords and delivers no message to the user.
HomeDepot.com could move the site name to the end and lose the preposition, punctuation and ampersands.
Lowes.com could move the site name to the end, but it's possible that "lowes home improvement" is their most important keyword (135K monthly searches) rather than "home improvement" (4M monthly searches). As it turns out they rank No.1 for both terms so it appears they have the best of both worlds. In addition, Lowes ranks ahead of Home Depot for the first product mentioned in both sites' page titles -- "appliances" and "kitchen cabinets" -- so they seem to be better SEO tuned than Home Depot.
|
Have a question? Comment below, or e-mail me | Subscribe via e-mail or RSS |
