If you ever wonder what page element has the most impact on search placement, look not further than the page title. The page title or “meta title” is the single most influential element that tells the search engine crawler the target content of a give web page. The page title is also the text that appears in the blue link on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
The next logical question aspiring webmasters ask is “how to configure a page title”. This is a matter of some debate since there is now a tendency toward what some SEOs call “over optimized” titles. the example below shows a result the ranks for the term “Barefoot Running“. These titles are the ones with several discrete keywords in them in order to cover multiple subjects or multiple iterations of the same phrase. It is probably safer to pick the version that has the most organic demand or the one your page can effectively rank for taking into consideration competition, content relevance and in-bound links.
The important tips for a strong title are pretty simple and include:
- Place the most important keyword/phrase as close to the beginning of the title as possible. You will notice that when you do a Google search that the keyword or phrase is displayed in bold text on the search results page for each of the top results.
- Keep the title under 70 characters (with spaces) to prevent the title from being truncated. This means that long blog titles should be abbreviated or modified the provide a more succinct phrase describing the post. A good example of this can be found on “the Hot Word” blog. Jay Schwartz works hard to create compelling and topical titles for his blog.
- Try to avoid placing the company or site “brand” at the beginning of the title for each page. This is a common mistake for many corporate web sites since it make the age titles appear to be duplicates at least at the start of the titles.
In a recent experience a team changed a page title by placing a more relevant keyword at the beginning and moving the brand to end of the phrase. This simple change caused and increase of over 40% in traffic month over month for just this one page.
My next post will talk about crafting a better snippet using meta descriptions.
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