Crafting the Perfect Page Title

Your page title is the single most important on page SEO element. It is a powerful ranking factor and a great opportunity to make you stand out from your competitors before they even visit your website. Therefore it is vital to get it right to improve your rankings and CTR (Click through rate).

What is a page title?

The page title is usually the text that appears in blue/purple in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) with the keywords highlighted in bold like you can see below.

What does it look like in the code?

Every webpage should have a page title which appears in the HTML like this:

<title>Internet Marketing &amp; Online Advertising | Dublin, Ireland – Vroom SEO</title>

If your website is using a CMS like WordPress or Joomla you will be able to edit the page title from within the admin backend, otherwise you’ll have to get your hands dirty!

How do I write a page title?

There are a few important things to keep in mind when constructing a page title:

> You page title should accurately describe the contents of your page.

> You should include your primary keywords close to the beginning of the page titles as more weight is placed on earlier words.

> Avoid repeating keywords multiple times as this looks ‘spammy’ and unprofessional. It could also be interpreted as keyword stuffing which is against Google’s webmaster guidelines.

> Search engines only display a maximum of 70 characters including spaces so you should keep them shorter than this.

> Symbols such as ‘-‘, ‘|’ and ‘>’ can be used to separate your page titles into its various components.

> It’s easy to get preoccupied with including your main keyword phrases but it’s also important that it reads naturally and gives the user the information they are looking for.

>Page titles are similar to advertising copy. They should differentiate you from your competitors and incentivise the user to click on them.

> You can use a snippet optimisation tool to preview and perfect your page titles.

> Monitor your organic traffic and CTR (Click through rate) in Google analytics and webmaster tools respectively to gauge the impact of your page titles. Look at ranking too but don’t get obsessed!

About the author:
Dave Dungan is an SEO consultant at Dublin based Internet Marketing company Vroom Digital.

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