Part 3 Title Tag Do’s & Don’ts

This is the 3rd post in our series called Title Tag Do’s & Don’ts. In the last post we took a look at the don’ts of title tag optimization.

In part 2 the title tags were completely unfocused, over the 65 character limit, and not at all compelling or written for a human to actually read and click through. Title tags like this will result in your page being penalized for keyword stuffing.

As we discussed in part 1 a better strategy would be to create compelling keyword rich content, under the 65 character limit, using the exact keyword phrase up front and then a variation of that keyword in the middle or towards the end of the tag. We also put the company name at the end of the tag or better yet, left it out all together.

Now, in part 3 we are going to take a look at the best practices for using your keywords in your title tags. The first and most important thing to remember is to focus one keyword per page. Yup, that’s right- One & only one keyword per page with secondary or supporting keywords sprinkled throughout the pages content. Creating unique pages for each of the targeted keyword gives you the opportunity to rank for more pages thus giving you more real estate in the search engines.

For example, a page for dog collars, another page targeting dog leashes, another for dog harnesses and so on—rather than trying to pack everything into a single title tag. Supporting keywords for the dog collars page would be designer dog collars and fashion dog collars. When deciding on whether to target the singular or plural version of the keyword phrase you will need to take a look at your keyword research and focus on the one with the highest search volume.

Avoiding Duplicate Content in Title Tags

Another very and often used title tag mistake is not giving every web page a unique title. If you have duplicate title tags within your site, you risk having your pages banished to Google’s elusive and supposedly non-existent supplemental index. That would be the online equivalent of being sent to search engine nowhere land.

Ok, so you’re probably wondering what is the worst title tag mistake you can make and if not I’m going to tell you any way. The worst title tag mistake you can make is NO TITLE TAG AT ALL. Believe it or not web designers and business owner who have taken it apon themselves to optimize there website still fail to put anything in their title tag.

Not putting any title tag whatsoever will cause “Untitled Document” to be displayed as your page title in the search results. Surprisingly, there are over 34 million pages in the Google index that have “Untitled Document” as their title.

The same can be said for page titles like Welcome to our homepage, Company Name or index. Also, creating unique pages for keyword variations is something you want to avoid. Making different pages using keyword variations like dog collar, dog collars, and collars for dogs will dilute your keyword effectiveness. Besides how much unique content can you come up with for each of those terms. It is best practice to use those keyword variations as supporting keywords rather than creating unique pages for each.

The good thing is if you’ve been making these title tag mistakes it’s not too late to improve them using the SEO tips you’ve learned in these last 3 posts on Title Tag do’s and Don’t’s

Please feel free to leave comments or ask questions if you need any further help with proper title tag optimization.