SEO Step By Step Guide–19. Page Titles

If you are serious about your website SEO, then you must also serious about the title of your webpage. This is one of the areas that is handled very poorly by webmasters. Here are some dos and don’ts for coming up with search engine friendly page titles.

1.    When you use software programs like Dreamweaver, the title of the page will be by default untitled. The title of the page does not change when you save your file unlike your Microsoft Word document, which automatically changes the file name as your page name. If you do not remember to add appropriate titles, it will continue to remain as untitled. Therefore, make it a point to include an appropriate title.
2.    Make sure that your web page’s title includes your major keywords so that your webpage will render itself relevant for the searches made.
3.    If you are adding keywords in your title, you must also make sure that the page content is relevant to the title you have added for your page and vice versa.
4.    Remember that your website is not optimized for your company’s name. It should be optimized for your services and products because people will not be searching using your company name but keywords pertaining to your products or services. So give importance to your keywords in the page title. Let the starting words of the page title be your keywords and you can include your company’s name at the end of the title.
5.    You should not completely drop your company’s name in the title. When people search for your services along with the services, your company name too should be seen in the search results. When you are including your company name in your page title make sure that it appears within the first 55 to 65 characters because in search engine results the entire title will not be displayed. All the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN truncate longer titles to a maximum of 70 characters while displaying in the search results. Even if, your page title longer than 60 to 70 characters, search engine spiders would index only limited characters. The best practice is to limit it to 60 to 65 characters. W3 also recommends that the page titles be limited to 65 characters.
6.    Make meaningful titles and let it not be just a list of keywords separated by comma. Ultimately, internet users will be prompted to click on your website in the search listing only when the page titles are captivating and something that will match their search. Therefore, you must come up with user-friendly titles as much as you want to make it into search engine friendly titles.
7.    Pay attention to details and let it look professional. Be consistent with your title formatting. Do not go back and forth with upper case letters and lower case letters in a random fashion. Select a suitable format and stick to it all through your website.

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