Optimizing your website for search engines can be a little tricky. We’ve covered the basics in our Beyond the Buzzwords: SEO article about what’s important to search engines, but we didn’t really delve into any techniques. Here we’ll go over what’s important to have in your title tags for each page.
- Different Title Tags – you want each page to have a different title tag. Go to your website and flip through a few pages. If your site title is the same throughout (most likely your company name), you’re going to want to change that.Â
- Keywords First – If you’ve got an SEO campaign, you should have identified at least 10 keywords that you want your site to rank for. Within that, each page should have 2-3 keywords that best describe the content there (hint: it’s a good idea to have these keywords match your main keywords list). Pick the 2 most relevant keyword phrases and place them first in your title string
- Live in Apartments – We call them apartments to be cute, others may call them something else. They are separators between keyword phrases. They can be “>>” or “|”, but make sure to separate each section of your title tag into a different apartment. (Same complex, different rooms)
- Company Name or Tagline - The last part of your title should be either your company name or your tagline. If your company name includes some of your keywords, by all means, include it. If you think a lot of people will be searching for your business by name, then include it (you should already know this from your analytics report). However, if your company name doesn’t include any keywords and isn’t well know, try your tagline (which should include more about you if your company name is obscure).
Example:
Window Washing Springfield VA | About Squeaky Clean Company | Your Window Washing Experts
Great posting on title tags! I’ve found that most websites do not take advantage of this – I’ll be sharing your article with clients.
Thanks!