Website Title Tags

April 8, 2010

What are title tags?

One of the most basic, but important things you can do for your website (in terms of search engine optimisation – SEO), is to ensure that each and every page has its own unique, keyword rich title tag .

The title tag can be found at the top of your source code within the < title > and < /title > tags (on a web page, click on View > Source Code to view the page code).

Where will I see my title tag?

The page title will be shown within your site in the web browser here:

 

It is also shown within the search results here:

Because the title tag is shown in the search result pages, creating a well crafted title could also lead to an increased click through rate.

What should I include in my title tag?

We’d recommend a mixture of your company name and keywords. If you’re targeting a specific geographical area, include this as well. It’s important to remember that search engines only display a certain number of characters within your title. It varies between search engines, but if you aim to keep your title under 70 characters you’ll be fine.

For example, if you were an accounting firm in Fareham in Hampshire called Bill & Ben, you would may want to include your company name, your target area of Hampshire, as well as some keywords (which you would have hopefully researched already!). If you’re aware that the term ‘book-keeping’ and ‘tax returns’ are two of your major keywords, you could craft a title that looks like:

Bill & Ben Tax Accountants Hampshire

or you could have

Bill & Ben Book-Keeping Accountants Hampshire

However, you could try and fit it all in:

Bill & Ben Accountants – Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire

or

Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire > Bill & Ben Accounting Fareham

You can seperate or split the title using various characters. The common ones are: – > and |. There’s no “correct” one to use. Sometimes a ‘|’ might be better to split up different subjects such as ‘Tax Accountants | Book-Keeping’.  Whereas a ‘>’ can be better when the next section follows on from the first, i.e. ‘Hampshire Accountants > Bill & Ben’.

You can use proper sentences if you like ‘Bill & Ben are Hampshire based accountants’ would also work well.

Try not to get into the trap of spending hours fiddling and obsessing over your title tags. Just make sure they make sense, conveys the content on the page well, and include your desired keywords.

If you’re ranking well for a particular search term, but you’re not getting a lot of clicks, it could be that your title tag isn’t compelling enough. Sometimes it can take a bit of testing and tweaking to get it right.

Our next post will be focusing on another important website tag – the meta description!

Until then, cheerio. If you have any questions or comments regarding your title tags, or if you’ve seen a vast improvement in your rankings because of changes you made to your title tags – let us know in the comments below, or email us on info@SMEketing.com.

Filed under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Website Design / Maintenance

Tags: (SEO), meta titles, search engine optimisation, title tags, Website ranking