Onsite SEO – How to optimize your titles


There are many things you can do on your website to help you improve your rank in the search engines.  Ideally, every page on your site should be properly SEO optimized.  If you keep in mind the following techniques when creating content for your website you will greatly improve your ranking.

Interesting

Having good titles is important for many reasons.  First and foremost your titles should catch people’s attention.  While this technically is not SEO it is still important for attracting readers.  Typically the first thing a person sees on your page is your title.  If it isn’t interesting they won’t stay on your website.  Also, your title is what is shown in the search engines.  If it doesn’t contain what the person is searching for they won’t even bother clicking on your link to come to your website.

Keyword targeted

In addition to having an interesting catchy title it should also contain the keywords you are targeting with that specific page.  The page title is one of the most important places you can have your keyword for onsite SEO purposes.  Search engines give extra importance to the words found in your page title which leads to higher ranking for those specific words.

It is also important to not stuff your title with keywords.  Always keep in mind the first point – your titles are for people first.  Awkward keyword stuffed titles will just turn people away.

Unique

The titles of your pages should be unique across your website.  This helps people, and search engines, distinguish your site’s pages.  This practice is also recommended in the Google SEO starter guide.

Having unique titles helps improve the user experience.  Have you ever looked through your search history to find a page you visited?  If you have unique, descriptive titles then your users are much more likely to find you.

Ideal title length for SEO

While it is important to have interesting and descriptive titles you should try and keep them below 65 characters.  This is because this is all that will be shown in the search results.

In fact, if you go to Google right now and search for something you will notice that the longer titles get cut off and have ellipses (…) at the end.  This is undesirable as some of your message will be missing and this could reduce the number of clicks you get.

Tools

If you are using WordPress then I recommend the free plugin called All in one SEO Pack.  This is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for on site SEO.  It allows you to work with many SEO elements including optimizing your page title.

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