Title Tag Guidelines

Posted on May 7th, 2007 in Onsite SEO by Dan

Continuing a little bit with the idea of Meta Tags and other onsite SEO tactics I thought I’d go ahead and mention some tips about the title tag today. The title tag is not technically a meta tag since it is actually visible, but it follows some of the same rules. And, as far as onsite SEO goes (things you do to your website) the title is one of the most important things you can optimize.

So what should you put as your title? Most people would just assume that they should put the name of their site. This would be a natural thought, but it is not the best way to do it. What you want to do instead is go back through the research that you’ve done previously and pick out your 2-4 best phrases and make those your title for the page they are relevant for. Keep in mind that as with meta tags, the title should be different for each page in the website. So don’t use the same title for every single page.

So, let’s say for example that your site is www.someproductsite.com. And let’s also say that after doing our research we find out that our best phrases are ‘phrase 1′, ‘phrase 2′, and ‘phrase 3′. There are other phrases that also look good, but today we’re working on the home page and these are the best 3 phrases for that page. So rather than making our title “Welcome to SomeProductSite.com”, we would make it “Phrase 1 | Phrase 2 | Phrase 3″. You can separate the words any way you want (| , :: are a few that people use), but this is the basic format. Don’t forget, the phrases you use will be different for each and every page. You may have a few phrases that get duplicated to other pages, but don’t make the whole website have the same title for every page.

Let me know if any of you have questions about this or if I need to clarify anything.

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4 Responses to 'Title Tag Guidelines'

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  1. Mark said,

    on May 9th, 2007 at 12:09 am

    I can say this definitely works. We used our keywords in the title tags and got rankings for related keywords we weren’t even going for. Good advice.

  2. Dan said,

    on May 9th, 2007 at 5:13 pm

    Thanks for the comment Mark!

    Arguably the title tag really is one of the most important things you can do for onsite SEO. Glad to hear that writing good title tags has been helpful for you!


  3. on July 1st, 2007 at 7:56 am

    Thanks for the tip I usually put this way:
    Title = “Best keywords”
    H1/H2=”Second best keywords”
    Meta Desc =”Third best keywords”

  4. Dan said,

    on July 2nd, 2007 at 5:29 am

    Luca Della Rocca,
    Technically you should put your best keywords inside the meta information and inside h1/h2 tags as well if possible. But your guidelines are a good start!

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