Title Tags - The Sharpest Tool in the Shed

Joel Gales Sullivan
The title tag is one of the most important tools you have in optimizing your web site for search engine results pages (SERPs). The title tag <title> comes at the beginning of the HTML for the page and is one of the primary sources of information for spiders or robots crawling your site. A concise title tag using good keywords is one of the best ways to improve the rankings for pages in your site, and the home page is the most important page to have a custom title tag for.
   
In Rivista, all pages will have a title tag automatically generated for them, so while it's optimal to have title tags for the top-level pages, it's not necessary to create a custom one for each page or article in the system. In creating custom title tags for the home page and the major landing (or section) pages, there are some guidelines to keep in mind:

Use Good Keywords

Look at the content of a page to determine the best keywords or search terms to use. For a section page like Dining, good keywords might include the following: dining, restaurant, restaurants, bars, wine, restaurant reviews, dining guide, eat out, wine bars, wine tasting, recipes, cafes, diners, food blog. And so on.

Include a Geographical Location

Imagine yourself doing a search on Google or some other search engine. If you were looking for a place to go out to eat near home or work on a Friday night, what terms would you enter? Which search terms do you think might get better results --  'mexican restaurants' or 'san francisco mexican restaurants'?

I always try to include a geographical location in the home page and main landing page title tags. Many publishers are concerned with branding and like to include the name of the magazine in the title tag so that it will display at the top of the browser. If it is important to have the name of the magazine in the title tag, I would place it at the end rather than the beginning of the tag.

We believe it is more important to include the geographical location for narrowing searches than to have the magazine brand represented in SERPs links. The reason for this is because Google, for one, places greater importance upon search terms near the beginning of a title tag, especially in the first 68 characters.

Limit Title Tag to Optimal Character Length

According to many sources, the optimal character length (including spaces) is 68. That is the number of characters Google will display in its SERPs, and any keyword after the 68th character is cut off and, some say, either disregarded or given less weight. In my research, I have seen sites come up very high in the rankings with longer title tags, so I would venture to say that Google doesn't give demerits for title tags longer than 68 characters, though I would be wary of creating title tags much longer than 80 or 90 characters.

With this character limit in mind, it's now time to return to that original list of keywords and start trimming. Usually with the inclusion of a geographical area in the title tag, there is room only for two to four keywords at most. Choose keywords that describe the content on the page, and then use them again in the meta description and actual content of the page. More on that later...

Joel Gales Sullivan is Content Manager at Godengo and an avid student of search engine optimization, especially in regard to its use with Rivista. If you have questions or comments regarding optimizing your site, please contact her at joel(at)godengo(dot)com.

Posted by Super on March 24, 2008 at 07:03 PM in Search Engine Optimization | Permalink

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