Part 3 – Title Tag Do’s & Don’ts
This is the 3rd post in our series called Title Tag Do’s & Don’ts. In the last post we took a look at the don’ts of title tag optimization.
In part 2 the title tags were completely unfocused, over the 65 character limit, and not at all compelling or written for a human to actually read and click through. Title tags like this will result in your page being penalized for keyword stuffing.
As we discussed in part 1 a better strategy would be to create compelling keyword rich content, under the 65 character limit, using the exact keyword phrase up front and then a variation of that keyword in the middle or towards the end of the tag. We also put the company name at the end of the tag or better yet, left it out all together.
Now, in part 3 we are going to take a look at the best practices for using your keywords in your title tags. The first and most important thing to remember is to focus one keyword per page. Yup, that’s right- One & only one keyword per page with secondary or supporting keywords sprinkled throughout the pages content. Creating unique pages for each of the targeted keyword gives you the opportunity to rank for more pages thus giving you more real estate in the search engines.
For example, a page for dog collars, another page targeting dog leashes, another for dog harnesses and so on—rather than trying to pack everything into a single title tag. Supporting keywords for the dog collars page would be designer dog collars and fashion dog collars. When deciding on whether to target the singular or plural version of the keyword phrase you will need to take a look at your keyword research and focus on the one with the highest search volume.
Avoiding Duplicate Content in Title Tags
Another very and often used title tag mistake is not giving every web page a unique title. If you have duplicate title tags within your site, you risk having your pages banished to Google’s elusive and supposedly non-existent supplemental index. That would be the online equivalent of being sent to search engine nowhere land.
Ok, so you’re probably wondering what is the worst title tag mistake you can make and if not I’m going to tell you any way. The worst title tag mistake you can make is NO TITLE TAG AT ALL. Believe it or not web designers and business owner who have taken it apon themselves to optimize there website still fail to put anything in their title tag.
Not putting any title tag whatsoever will cause “Untitled Document” to be displayed as your page title in the search results. Surprisingly, there are over 34 million pages in the Google index that have “Untitled Document” as their title.
The same can be said for page titles like Welcome to our homepage, Company Name or index. Also, creating unique pages for keyword variations is something you want to avoid. Making different pages using keyword variations like dog collar, dog collars, and collars for dogs will dilute your keyword effectiveness. Besides how much unique content can you come up with for each of those terms. It is best practice to use those keyword variations as supporting keywords rather than creating unique pages for each.
The good thing is if you’ve been making these title tag mistakes it’s not too late to improve them using the SEO tips you’ve learned in these last 3 posts on Title Tag Do’s and Don’t’s
Please feel free to leave comments or ask questions if you need any further help with proper title tag optimization.
I was looking to use your SEO services but you have a google page rank of two and a website grade of 24 out of 100. Can you explain your low credibility on your personal SEO but how you perform well for your clients? You are not practicing what you preach??
Thank You,
Hi Julie,
Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment on our blog. Your question is a great one and I would love to answer it for you. There are over 200 ranking factors Google takes into account when determining if your site is authoritative enough to do well in the search engines. Page rank is determined by the number of high quality links a site has pointing back to it. Google’s “Page Rank” in the Google tool bar is only updated every 3 months (4 times a year) so what you see today may not be a true reflection of the actual page rank. In order to reach the next level of page rank you need to do double of what you did to get to your current page rank. So if you have a PR of 3 you would need to double your efforts to make it to a PR 4.
Technically, page rank means nothing and is often suggested by industry guru’s not to put too much weight into it. As a matter of fact last month’s issue of the Search Engine News by Planet Ocean told us that Google is taking the page rank bar out of their toolbar completely in an effort to get people away from using page rank as an indicator of how authoritative a site actually is. What’s important is where a site shows up in the search engines for the keywords they are targeting and we are finally starting to rank well for the majority of our keywords with exception of the really competitive ones.
Another reason our site only has a PR of 2 is because our site is pretty new. A brand new domain name takes a lot longer to rank than sites that have been around for a while. Our site is less than a year old and there are not enough links built to it yet in order to warrant a higher page rank. We are currently working on that. Link building is a slow ongoing process that needs to be strategically planned and executed. I’m not sure where you found the 24 out of a 100 website grade so i don’t know what you mean by that.
We have completed comprehensive keyword research for all of our keywords and then created pages focused on those researched keywords. If you go to Google and type in site:group5web.com you will see all of the pages Google has indexed of our site. There you will be able to see all of our Title and Description tags which are all unique and highly focused. There are over 60 things to be done to each page to fully optimize it so if you know what your looking for you could see that we actually are practicing what we preach.
The keywords we are focusing on are very competitive and therefore it takes longer to rank for them. By rank i mean where we show up in the search engines when someone Googles the keywords we are targeting. These things just take time and as I’m sure you know there are no guarantees. As far as our clients go, we definitely put more attention on making them rank than we do ourselves because, to be honest, they pay us for it. That doesn’t mean we don’t want our own site to perform well, it’s just more important to make them successful than it is for us to get found.
I hope that helps you understand things better. If you would like to learn more about SEO you can check out our blog dedicated to helping newbies and business owners understand SEO. I don’t post as often as i should but the content is quality. http://www.TheSeoQueen.com. Feel free to contact us any time if you have more questions.