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Meta Title Tags are Gold
By Peter Bowen (c) 2010

How to write compelling page titles

From an SEO perspective, the title of the webpage is very
important. These are the words that describe what your page is
about and are the first words that a search engine sees when
it crawls your webpage looking for content to add to its index.

The page title is also what the searcher sees in a search result
- so the page title is very important in describing what the page
is about and if the title meets the searcher's criteria, then it
is more likely to be clicked on and your page opened.

It is safe to assume that the majority of searchers these days
will be tempted to either click or ignore based on the content
of the title. This is like your ad in the natural search section
of the search engine results page.

Now that the impact of the title of the webpage is obvious, let
me explain how to write an effective and powerful title.

First the basics! The webpage title aka the title tag is the
synopsis of the content of the web page. So, as no two pages on
your website are the same, hence why should their title tags be?
Therefore, as a general rule, title tags for each page on your
website should be unique. This is an added bonus from an SEO
perspective, because now you can target many more keywords and
spread your reach across search engine indexes.

The second thing to consider is whether you want to add your
company name in the title tag? The answer is that it depends on
your branding strategy. If your company name is a known brand,
or if you want to promote your firm name as a brand or if your
company name consists of keyword(s) that you want to target such
as ABC Family Solicitors targeting the keyword "Family
Solicitors", then by all means add your company name in the
title tag. If not, then use the limited but valuable space to
add your targeted keywords. If you do decide to add your company
name, make sure that it is at the end of the title. This is
because you want search engines and your visitors to first read
the targeted keyword(s) for that page and then the company name.

It is important to remember that since the title tag is the
synopsis of the content of the web page, you need to make sure
that the title tag is relevant. For example, the title tag for
an about us page is "About Website Design Company - ECommerce
Partners". Hence, the title tag does its job of informing what
the page is about. Now, you might have noticed that instead of
"About Us - ECommerce Partners", we added "About Website Design
Company - ECommerce Partners".

The reason is because "Website Design Company" is one of the key
phrases we want to target and so, we replaced "About Us" with
"About Website Design Company". This brings out an important
point. We need to do a keyword analysis before we write an
effective and powerful title tag.

Keyword mining and analysis is a very important part of writing
compelling page titles and is a part of the 'Search Engine
Optimization' (http://www.firstoneon.com/
search_engine_optimisation.shtml) service that First One On
provides to their clients.

The next step after keyword analysis will be to write down title
tags for each and every web page on your website.

Please be careful when writing title tags and never, never over
stuff keywords in the title. Doing so will undermine the power
of the title tag and defeat the purpose of better ranking in the
search engines. The title tag is the title of your web page and
so it must be relevant and meaningful. Remember, this is the
title in your AD in the natural search listings of the search
engine.

General Suggestion: You cannot promote all of your keywords in
one page. Normally, you should promote 3 to 5 keyword phrases
per page. The 'Title tag' should contain up to 3 important
keywords that match to the body of the page content. If the
keyword you are trying to promote is highly competitive, you can
consider repeating the important keyword twice in the first 100
words of the page content.

Limit the length of the title keywords to 65 characters
or less, including spaces. There's no reason to have the engines
cut off the last word and have it replaced with a "..."  Note
that some search engines are now accepting longer titles and
Google, in particular, is now supporting up to 70 characters.

Use a divider when splitting up the keywords. We generally
recommend the use of the "|" symbol aka the pipe bar. Others
choose the arrow ">" or hyphen "-" and both work well.

Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 heading tag can be
valuable from both a SEO keyword targeting standpoint and a user
experience improvement. Users who go to the page from the search
result listing will have the expectation of finding the title
they clicked on. Users will be more likely to stay on a page
they're reasonably certain fits their intended search query.
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Peter Bowen is a seasoned marketing communications professional
with an extensive web based marketing background, he won the
1994 Entrepreneur of the Year award for developing an online
shopping mall when the internet was in its infancy. Passionate
about internet search engine marketing and "converting clicks
into customers" by applying proven SEO strategies.
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