Title Tags and SEO – Ranking Factors 101

When it comes to top factors that increase search engine rankings title tags are at the top of any competent SEOs list. Title tags are still highly valued by that all search engines when it comes to crawling the page to find the page theme.

Title tags are essentially a page title for your web page. Each webpage should have unique page titles and should incorporate the target keywords for that individual page. Not every page of your website is going to have the same content therefore it is important that each page have an individual title.

What are Title Tags?

Page titles are most visible to users in the two following locations:

Where can I see my page titles?

Title Tag Location #1 - Shown as the title of your webpage in the search engine results pages.

Page titles are best when they are short and sweet. The general consensus among as SEO’s is that there is higher value to placing your main keyword at the beginning of the page title. If you’re targeting two key words on a page the best practice is to do the following:

Primary Key word-Secondary Keyword | Brand name

If your business is a well-known business or brand, it may be beneficial to present your page titles in the following way:

Brand Name | Primary Key word and Secondary Keyword

When writing your title tag it is important to consider it must be relevant to the content of the page. Having a page title with the key word strawberries on a page that has content about potatoes shows a disconnect to the search engines as they crawl your page. Your title tag will therefore bring a no value to your content.

It is critical that your title tag never be longer than 65 characters. The reason for this is that in the search results only 65 characters are shown before the title is truncated. Some search engines will read up to 80 characters in a title tag, though 65 characters is considered the best practice.

As an interesting side note title tags are becoming increasingly more important as they are being used as anchor text in social media links. So when someone posts a link to your website on their Facebook page, Facebook takes the title tag and uses that as the anchor text pointing back to your website. We’ll talk more about anchor text in posts regarding link building.

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