Your Page Title Sucks – So Fix It!

Theory

For many sites, this is a true statement. When Web pages are built, the title is often overlooked and left to the default naming convention such as “homepage” or “index.html.” And while many users don’t oftentimes look at the title of a Web page (although some do), search engines primarily look there to make sure they are at the right place.

Let’s look at this from a different perspective for a moment. A Website’s title is like the title of a book. When you go to the bookstore and grab a book off the shelf, the title of that book should give you a good idea as to what the book is about. The same applies to Google and other search engines. When they send their crawlers out into the World Wide Web to find relevant Web pages for a particular keyword, those crawlers are looking at millions (and sometimes, billions) of page titles to find the use of those keywords as a means to describe the page. For example, if a search engine is searching through millions of Web page titles looking for the keyword “laptops,” and your page title says “homepage” or even just your brand (i.e. “Dell.com – with no other keywords), most crawlers will not rank your page for that keyword. However, in a few cases, if your page is well optimized for that keyword and has a strong page rank from strong links they may authoratatively rank your site (as opposed to relatively rank your site- we’ll discuss these two in a bit). Here’s a screenshot of Apple ranking 9th in Google for “laptops” without using the keyword in the title:

Practice

So here’s how to make your page titles work for your users and search engines. The key is SEO keyword research. In other words, it’s about finding the best keyword to write into your page’s title. Once you determine the right keyword to use, the next step is to accurately write your new page title. When writing page titles there are a few very important things to keep in mind, such as:

• Title length – should be kept between 45-60 characters (longer titles will get cut off in browswers and bookmarks)
• Keyword stuffing – Don’t reuse the same keyword (even in a different phrase) more than 2-3 times for a particular page title. Also, make sure that your titles are not blatantly written for search engines (i.e. “New Shoe Warehouse – New shoes, new running shoes, new women’s shoes, new men’s shoes, and more! New Shoes Online – NSW.com
• Bookmarks – Remember that your page titles are the default name of bookmarks for those that add your page to their bookmark list. If your brand (or site) name is not at the beginning, users may often not know what your site is about when scanning through long bookmark lists. Therefore, keep your brand (or site) as the first words in your homepage title and keep interal page titles short and sweet to prevent bookmarking problems for users.
• Delimeters – Moreso a consideration for URL writing, but it’s important to note that most search engines do not understand the /\ (forward or back slash) and _ (underscore) delimeters between keywords. Therefore, it’s a common SEO best-practice to use the – (hyphen) to separate keywords. However, only use delimiters in your title if you have to (which you most likely won’t). Otherwise, just keep this tip on the radar for URL rewrites.
• Positioning – Your homepage should show your brand at the beginning of your title. All internal pages should be positioned in order of site taxonomy, ending with the brand (or domain).
• Frequency – Page titles should not be rewritten more than 1-2 times (and at the very most 3), as search engines can view more than 3 times as too aggressive. Also, if a user changes the page title too often (remember, search engines see titles as a page’s identity tag), they may begin to question what the “real” theme of the site is if it changes so often.

So, let’s just recap (or let me continue to stress the point) why you should make this optimization. Having an optimized page title not only helps search engines better understand what your particular page is about, but also helps them understand the internal workings and order of your entire site. This can be a very good way to get all of your deep internal pages ranking for long-tail keywords. Additionally, an optimized title allows users (that look for them) to reaffirm that they are at the right place. Therefore, page title optimization is good for search engines and your users. Ok, enough said. Time to go rewrite your titles.

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