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9 Common Title Tag Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

By Kristina Weis in Featured

A website’s title tags are very important for several reasons:

1) The title tag shows up in search results as the blue link, and a good one helps the site get more clicks and visitors from
search results.

2) Title tags are a crucial SEO element that can help the website show up higher when people search for the words in it.

3) Title tags show up when web pages are shared on social media sites like Facebook. This is important because social media mentions are now a ranking factor in Google search results.

So if you have the time to optimize one thing on your website, title tags are it.

Here are some of the top mistakes and missed opportunities I’ve seen in title tags. Avoid these and you’ll be ahead of the game. You’ll rank higher in search results and entice more people to click on your site.

9 Signs of a Bad Title Tag:

1. “Home” or “Home Page” in Title Tag

Reader Rescue : Should My Meta Description Tags Just Duplicate My Title Tags?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Everyone

From early days learning SEO, I went ahead and did all my meta descriptions with a bit of blurb about the page but my *Guru* has told me this is incorrect and I should include only the title of the page in the meta description, eg “Antique Dining Chairs” whereas I had put in “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre.  Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home”.

Any thoughts before I go and change everything yet again?

Christine

————————————–

Hi Christine

From where I’m sitting, your *guru* is wrong. Remember, your meta description tag is often used as the snippet on the search results pages to describe your site.

So apart from including keywords, it has to do the job of convincing people to click on it. A nonsensical list of keywords is not going to convince people to click so you have to balance it out with an appealing sentence, preferably including a call-to-action or reason to click.

Yes, it’s important to put your keywords at the start of the tag if you can, but you have up to 160 characters in that tag indexed by search engines, so you should use the space to your advantage. Having a short, unimaginative meta description or simply copying your title tag is not going to make any difference to your overall rankings and is more likely to turn your potential visitors off.

Google admitted that it no longer considers the meta description tag in their ranking algorithm anyway, so, other search engines aside, the main job of the tag in Google SERPs is to convince people to click on the link and visit your site.

Put it this way: if you were in the market for an antique chair and you saw the following two listings in Google, which one would you click on?

• Site1.com – “Antique Dining Chairs.”
  
• Site2.com – “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre. Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home.“

I’m thinking Site2.com – am I right? And – oh look! The longer tag managed to include *dining chairs* twice and a whole bunch of other keyword phrases as well: *dining chairs Glebe*, *chairs Glebe*, *occasional chairs*, *Antique(s) Glebe*.

Case closed.

————————————–

Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Post it in the comments and you might see it featured here on the blog.

Does Your Web Site Pass the Title Tag Test?

By Stone Reuning in Featured

You know those words in the top bar of the browser when you’re on a website? You may not have noticed them before now, but you’ll want to pay attention to what shows there for your site from now on.

Those words are from the page’s title meta tag, a part of the code that makes up the page. And while the title tag is just one small part of the code, it plays a really big role.

Title tags are crucial in getting your site indexed and ranked in the search engines. A title tag tells the search engine what your page is about – and it’s also what displays in search results to represent your site.

Let’s take a look at your title tags now. Pull up your site and look at what appears in the very top bar of the browser.

Everything you need to know about the future of search engine marketing you learned in the 1990s

By David Berkowitz in Featured

That’s an overstatement, of course, but the basics of SEO and SEM — the very first things you probably learned  — now are more important than they’ve been in years for bringing people back to your Web site. It’s all thanks to the new browser wars among Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, all of which are generally evolving in the same direction. All three, for instance, support searching from the address bar, where you normally enter a Web site URL. Chrome encourages this the most, as it doesn’t even have a search box, but the same feature is on all the browsers. The searches all are conducted through the default search engine you select (IE8, for example, doesn’t hold you to Live Search).

More importantly, these address bars all offer suggestions as you type. Generally, these are based on which sites you’ve previously visited, how often and/or recently you’ve visited them, and potentially some other factors. Firefox sticks to your browsing history, but Google will sometimes recommend other sites it deems relevant, while Microsoft occasionally recommends a page from one of its properties. The history is what marketers and publishers have the most control over, so that’s where the focus needs to be.

The opportunity here is retention. If someone has visited your site before, however they found it, you want to increase the odds that they’ll come to you directly rather than search again and potentially check out competitors. Ideally, you want to be found through search once, and then save the consumer the need from ever running that kind of search again.

For starters, you should optimize page titles. All three browsers rely on them. For instance, I ran a search that I tried when planning my honeymoon: “travel India.” I clicked one ad, leading me to a landing page entitled, “Private Guided Travel in India & Nepal: India, U.A.E., Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan.” I searched again and clicked on another ad where the landing page simply had the tour operator’s name. Now, whenever I start typing “travel India” in the address bar, that first tour site comes up, and it will also come up if I start typing queries relating to any of countries listed in the title. The site for the other operator never comes up. The same effect shows up across all three browsers.

Another important factor is the filename. I went to my blog and clicked on a photo of Usher from the Service Nation event in New York a couple weeks ago. The filename is usher_at_service_nation_nyc.jpg. Now, when I type “Usher” in my Firefox address bar, it leads me right to that image. With IE8, it actually goes to the blog post where that image lives rather than the image alone, even though I hadn’t actually visited that post in IE. Chrome doesn’t bring up the file in its suggestions at all, but that will most likely change over time. These browsers have a way of looking more alike, even as they stake out their own identities.

Reviewing these optimization basics won’t likely cause a huge difference overnight. As I mentioned in my end of summer roundup, it will take some time to learn how much these new browsers encourage direct navigation. Yet it’s somewhat reassuring that you probably already know the tactics that will put you in the best position with the new browsers, and they’ll provide other benefits for your landing pages whether you’re focused on SEO or paid search. While it may be frustrating needing to focus on a new round of browser wars, they can make you feel smarter for having learned all the tricks already.

David Berkowitz is director of emerging media and client strategy at 360i. You can reach him at dberkowitz@360i.com, and you can read his blog at MarketersStudio.com

Reader Rescue: Can the title tag make such a difference to ranking?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Today’s question is from Andy, who writes:

Hi Kalena,

I have a very important question. I have a blog that has been getting steady 40-50 visitors from Google everyday. About 4 days back, I changed the homepage title. From the very next day, my traffic fell to 30 and to 20 and to 14 and yesterday I have had only 7 visitors. I havent built any new backlinks. The site has been growing naturally. The blog is 3 months old.

Can a change in title tag really cause such a disaster?

Thanks
Andy

Hi Andy

Yes, it certainly can. The content of the Title tag is one of the most important factors that search engines take into account when ranking sites for search relevancy. It’s SEO101!

Cheers
Kalena

Title Tags – WHAT’S IN A NAME?

By Robert Cerff in Featured

The title tag has to be, in my humble opinion, the most important on-page factor when it comes to high rankings in the search engine results pages. Found in the head tag of a standard html page, the title is the first place that you can start placing your keywords. Surprisingly some pages don’t define this tag. Worse yet, some overlook it and omit it altogether. Here is a basic example of where the title tag fits into an average HTML page.

Web page content goes here.

Here are five points I always consider when constructing a title.

Limit the length of the title.

Google currently displays approximately 63 characters of a title. The total number of characters displayed varies from engine to engine. While it is not the end of the world to exceed this by a slight margin, (I don’t believe there are any penalties for having a long title) remember that the search engines will cut off anything that goes beyond that which they display. This would leave you with a “…” instead of a complete title.

The title tag can be useful for branding your traffic.

By adding your website or company name to the title tag you can build brand awareness and increase returning direct traffic. While many suggest doing this I would only recommend adding your company or website name to the end of your title tag. While I don’t think it makes much difference to the order, your keywords are placed in the title tag, I suggest that you ensure your keywords are towards the beginning of the tag as it reads easier. Once again don’t forget that the title tag is the first thing that is displayed from each site by the search engines.

Divide your title tag.

When branding your site, break the title tag so that it becomes obvious which is the page title and which is the site name/title. I find that by using the pipe break “|” (that’s the funny symbol above the “\” key) I am able to do this quite neatly. This is also a great way keep your titles consistent. For example:

Instead of:

As you can see it makes it a lot clearer when considering which part of the title labels the page and which part labels the website.

NEVER, I repeat never, repeat your title.

Each page should have a unique title. By giving each page a unique title you are telling the search engines that each page is indeed unique. For exactly the same reason that you don’t name every file the same, (Well, apart from the most obvious reason which is that you just can’t!) as it is easy to distinguish the contents of a file by simply scanning the title. The same principal applies to web pages. This also goes a long way to indexing the priority of each page. If every page had the same title, which page would be ranked more relevant than the next?

Keywords in the title.

I have spent a lot of time optimising websites for real estate agents. While their stock standard pages have targeted keywords in the title, headings and content, it becomes a little more challenging to do the same for each listing. This is usually where the developers come into play. With a little effort the Title can be dynamically created. In my case, it drastically changed the titles I could offer from something such as:

To a far more specific title that really does describe the listing perfectly:

Okay, so I usually go a little further than that, but as you can see the title not only makes perfect sense and describes the page but also is keyword rich for the search phrase “house for sale in suburb” or even area in this case. While this works well for this kind of website, the principles can be applied to any other dynamically created web page.

I have noticed that time and time again the search engines return results with the search phrase in the title. I think we can all agree that if a web page has been titled correctly then the page will be accurately described. However search engines will discount a title that is no more than a list of spammed keywords. I think we’ve all heard the mantra, “create pages for real people not robots,” too many times. I would prefer to change that statement:

“Make well structured, informative web pages that are relevant to what you are doing.”

When you apply the above, search engines have little option but to regard each page highly and rank it accordingly. While there are so many other factors to consider when optimising a page I believe the title to be a crucial element.

Robert Cerff is a search engine analyst and marketing consultant for Prop Data Internet Solutions. He has ten years experience in e-commerce, online marketing and web development. http://www.propdata.co.za