Are you staring at your screen, pulling your hair out and asking aloud, “why isn’t my website showing up on Google for the keywords I want?”
If this sounds at all familiar then the problem could be that you’ve overlooked an important aspect of SEO – your title tags. Fixing the title tag of a website can often result in your website improving its search engine ranking very quickly. This is particularly true if you are not targeting very competitive keywords. Use the keywords you found via our keyword research guide and put the most important keywords at the start of your title tag.
What are title tags?
Title tags are the most important piece of SEO you can implement on your own site. The title tag is used to help determine a webpage’s relevance to a particular topic. All the major search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask use the title tag to understand what your webpage is about.
If you use Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers you will be able to see the title tag of your website in the blue bar at the top of the screen (screenshot below):
The title tag is also the linkable text that is shown on most major search engine results pages. A bad title, or no title at all, will mean that users are less compelled to click-through from the search results and visit your website. This means you lose out on interested people coming to your site.
What the most Common title tag mistakes
So what exactly can you do to ensure that more people visit your site because of your title tags? Some of the most common title tag mistakes include:
- Lack of keywords
- Keyword stuffing
- Inaccurate information/lack of relevancy
- Using the same title tag on every page
We’ll look these common issues in more detail. The first thing you need to do is to include the keywords that you want to target in the page’s title tag.
Of course, what this doesn’t mean is that you stuff as many keywords as you can into the title tag. Put yourself in the searcher’s position, if you saw a long list of keywords would you want to click on the link – or would you click on the link that looked like a human wrote it?
You’ll also need to make sure that the keywords in the title tag have some relevance to the copy you have on your page. For example, if you have a page about “Malaysian recipes”, you don’t want your title tag to include the keywords “Chinese recipes” just because during your keyword research phase you found that “Chinese recipes” had more people searching for that term each month.
Your aim with a title tag (and the description under it) is to provide accurate information to a search engine visitor. Often SEO newcomers feel like they need to “trick” the search engine user into visiting their site. Think about it though, if you “trick” a user by providing inaccurate information do you think it is likely they will ever return to your website? Remember, ranking number one on all the major search engines is not the end goal. If you are number one on the search engines yet nobody visits your site because they know it to be untrustworthy then your number one listing is worthless.
Creating compelling copy
So just how do you include keywords into your title tag without making them seem spammy? In your keyword research you will usually find that some of the keywords you wish to target can overlap to form complete sentences. These complete sentences will compel users to click through to your website more than simply having a long list of keywords in your title tag.
Which of these two examples do you think visitors would be more likely to click on?
1) Sitename.com – Credit Card|Balance Transfers|Prepaid Credit Cards
2) The Best Credit Card Deals For Balance Transfers – SiteName.com
Hopefully you said the second example or now I’m just going to look stupid!
The second example has the benefit of actually reading like a real sentence while containing a number of different key phrases. The sentence still contains a number of different keyword phrases, including:
- Best Credit Card Deals For Balance Transfers
- Best Credit Card Deals
- Credit Card Deals
- Balance Transfers
- Credit Card
Spend some time to find overlapping keyword phrases that can be used in a complete sentence.
Top tip: Try to include the most important keywords at the start of the title tag. You can still have your brand/site name in the title, but unless you are a huge established brand then you should move the branded keywords towards the end of the title tag (as seen in example 2 above).
While changing the title tag is unlikely to help your webpage rank higher for competitive keywords like “credit card”, they do help you to rank higher for long-tail phrases and less competitive terms. The title tag continues to be an important factor in helping a website to rank higher in the major search engines and is an important part of an overall SEO campaign.
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