What’s in a title? Helpful tips to make the most of your page title tag

Spending time working on clients’ sites it amazes me how many of them use the <title> tag to display their company name. One question…. Why?

How many people will search for a particular trade by a business name? Not many, if at all. If i’m looking for a local plumber for instance then i’ll type in something like “plumbers in hemel hempstead”, definately not “joe bloggs plumbers” because how do I know they even exist until i’ve found them?

A much more creative and SEO friendly way to use the title meta tag is to enter some relevent SEO terms in their, something along the lines of “Expert Plumbers in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire”. It now contains all the vital ingredients that Google needs to index the site correctly - PLUMBER, HEMEL HEMPSTEAD, HERTFORDSHIRE.

So what does the TITLE tag look like?

The title tag is inserted into the head of an HTML document. The tag - <title> is closed by an ending </title> tag and anything inside of it is classed as the page’s title. An example is given below:

<title>Web and print design in Hemel Hempstead</title>

As you can see we have used some keywords relevent to the sites content. Clearly we are web designers and graphic designers, and if we want to target the local market then we have also inserted our geographical location as well to snag in people searching for a local firm. This is illustrated in the screen grab below…

In the example image above you can see where the title tag is displayed in your browser. Its importance in SEO terms is well known, although its not the most important factor in SEO terms (quality page content is still vital), it does help to have a well written title tag.

How long should my title tag be?

According to the W3C, the title tag should ideally be no longer than 64 characters in length, also Google will only display the first 66 characters, so as a general rule anything over these lengths will get cropped and could be penalised for being too long. So the simple rule is don’t try and stuff every keyword you have in the <title>, save these for the Keyword and Description META tags.

Hopefully this short article has been of some use to you, by no means is the title tag and Meta data the key to high rankings, but it certainly helps and should be part of your wider SEO strategy.

If you would like more advice on your sites’ SEO then feel free to contact us for information on our SEO consultancy services

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