The Title tag is THE most important SEO element on your site.
Read that again, I’ll wait…
Ok. Now to explain.
The Title tag is at the top of the html code for each page on your site. It is the words between <title> and </title>.
You can see it at the top of your browser. In the google listing of that particular page, it is the headline, the clickable part which catches a searchers attention.
Having the same Title tag across your site is a big mistake and testing has shown it to be the biggest cause of the duplicate content penalty. Think about it… if you have 5 documents and you tell someone that all of them are about the same thing, they probably won’t bother reading past the first document. That’s what happens if you have the same Title tag across your site. Just don’t do it. Make them different.
Your Title tag should be no more than 65 characters or 10 words. Why? That’s how much the search engines display. You don’t want a searcher reading half your headline and wondering what the rest of it…
LOL. See what I mean?
The best way to work out what to say in your Title tag is to think of it like a newspaper. The Title is like the headline. It should be catchy, grab people’s attention and get them to click through to your site.
Your keyword should be in the Title. Which keyword? Well you should only be targetting one keyword in any one page… so it would be that keyword :)
Leave your company name out of the Title tag unless you are a famous brand, or trying to become one. And even then, you should consider having your brand or company name only in the Title tag for your homepage and nowhere else. Searchers usually don’t care who you are – they just want the answer to that query, whether that is information or a product.
The easiest way to find out how good your Title tags are is to search on google using:
site:yourdomain.com
Obviously replacing yourdomain.com with your domain (hey, some people don’t get it).
That search will list all the pages on your site that are in Google’s index. It makes it really easy to scan and see how unique each Title is.
So what are you waiting for? Do they need fixing? Then what are you still doing here? :D
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