Thursday, August 19, 2010

Behind the Scenes - a look at the Title Meta Tag

The <title> tag in the metatags should aim to include ALL 5 of the page's primary focus keywords in the title text... the title should be about 14-16 words maximum in length, the first two-three words in the title will be the PRIMARY focus keyword for the page. You can used punctuation, but aim to remove wasted information and unnecessary items, such as the following characters: -, :, !!!, all of which waste space in your valuable SEO realestate. Make it readable for humans as well as optimised for Search Engines! Market the title, make it compelling to click on... information rich... relevant to that page. Keep the page title brief. Including too many keywords (keyword stuffing) may dilute your overall relevancy rating. Aim to use a grammatically correct sentence as the title, rather than just a list of keywords. Most SE crop titles at around 70-90 characters, Google shows no more than 65 characters, so the more specific information that can be placed in a title in the first 8-10 words, the better. It is important to remember that titles should provide a ‘call to action’ the more compelling the call to action, the more likely the user will be to click on the SERPs result compared to competitors.

Think of the title as a mini advertisement for a page, try to entice the user to click through. Titles should be constructed from the content on the page to ensure maximum benefit and correlation for relevancy rankings in result pages. All of the keywords that appear in the title should appear within the content of the page. Make Titles as specific as possible, and promote differentiating content, e.g. if a site has several pages about South Africa, including separate pages for “South Africa Tours” and “Adventure Travel South Africa”, differentiate those two pages by using appropriate phrases.

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