As you know the title tag is one of the most important on-page ranking factors for a webpage. So it is unfortunate that I constantly see people stuffing a few keywords into a title tag and then calling it a day.
Bellow are a few best practices that hopefully will remind you to revisit those title tags and make sure they are doing their part!
#1 Put your most important keywords FIRST.
You should be able to work at least two to three keyword phrases into a title tag. Make sure they appear by order of importance. I have seen the simple change of keyword order make a huge difference in a sites ranking.
Think about the word order, proximity of keywords and repetition. I hesitated to put repetition in because it is so often abused. However, if you use a keyword at the start of a title tag and then work it in at the end that can be a good thing. Just don’t over do it!
Also, make sure you are using singular and plural versions of keywords where it makes sense.
#2 Move your Company Name to the end.
To be honest, I usually tell clients to include the company name at the start of their description tag and not to waste the space in the title tag. However, this is not a hard and fast rule and if you are a “known” brand it can help to have your name in the title. I rarely find it beneficial to start a title tag with your company name unless that pages main goal is for branding.
#3 Avoid stop words
Try not to use stop words like “and”, “a”, “the” etc. in your title tag. They are just skipped by Google so only use them if you have to for readability. However, if you are clever you really shouldn’t need to use them.
Make sure to you use dashes “-“ or pipes “|” to separate content and it will take up much less space and still aid readability.
#4 Keep it brief
In general about 65 characters “including spaces” is about the max you want for a title tag. Google will start to truncate your results after that anyhow. Simply paste your title tag into Word, highlight it and it will tell you how many characters “including spaces” you are using.
#5 Stay focused
While a homepage can usually target several keywords effectively, most internal pages should only target a specific category or product. When you are writing your title tags make sure to stay focused on the topic at hand and not to go too broad.
Bonus: If users don’t click you have failed
Always remember the end goal of a title tag is not only to rank you but to entice a user to CLICK! Think about your title tag like an advertising headline. Would you be grabbed by a headline of just keywords?
Experiment with your title tags and se what gives you more traffic. Do you have free shipping, price match guarantee or something In Stock that’s hard to find? Make sure to try working that into your title tag and or description.
I hope these quick tips got you thinking about your title tags again. It’s a great idea to review your title tags every few months and make sure you are getting the most out of them.
Feel free to add more tips in the comments.
Having been in the web development life cycle for many years, I have learned the reality of trying to stick to HTML/XHTML best coding practices, which include being as much W3C compliant as possible, but in the real world, not all web browsers are created equal, that we can only wish!
It is still most beneficial as a programmer to follow a standard flow of key decision choices, that is to keep future modifications and improvements easier and leads to quicker maintenance of your current website’s needs. It can also be easier for people new to your project or site to get acquainted with how its setup in both the front-end and back-end aspects of it.
While being able to have a nice shiny W3C compliant badge, may be cool, it surely does not mean that your site is going to just simply look the exact same in the currently most used web browsers by your visitors, let alone any really older or non-common web browsers.
In fact, having such a badge, and forgetting to check the compliance results from W3C’s online tools, may lead to a negative effect, where the visitor clicks on it, and because you didn’t confirm every page is complaint, one single html, xhtml or css level error will display a nasty non-compliance screen.
That is something you want to avoid, as it makes your site seem as if it was poorly put together, which is most likely not the case at all. As you can see above, even big name sites, do not follow compliance, and may even have hundreds of erroneous reports from online compliance validation tools, while their website looks and functions without any issue.
The best recommendations I have for people is to keep your code as clean and human readable as possible, along with attempting to follow standards as much as you can, and if you need to utilize some non standard, or non compliance code, its fine, go ahead.
Truly, as long as your website fully functions properly for your audiences needs, you are actually ahead of the curve. A lot of sites still to this day have things that do not work in Firefox or Chrome, and only work properly in Internet Explorer, sometimes even specific older version of it.
Another thing to consider is switching your document type, as typically I utilize XHTML with Transitional, meaning some “older” style HTML is allowed, such a table-specific items, this may allow what you were trying to accomplish and might put you that much closer to compliance validation.
Also keep in mind to always cross browser test not just in each web browser, but also in many different (most commonly used/recent) versions, and on different computers, as things like font sizes and generic style sheet rules may surprise you on a certain combination of browser, version and operating system.
Bonus Tip: Different sites will attract different user types, meaning even further potential browser support that you must maintain, you should utilize tools like Google Analytic’s to identify which browsers your visitors are using.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply. Thanks!
