Title Tag Turmoil
Posted by admin on July 27, 2010 under Coding, SEO, Web Design | 
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The biggest issue that almost all clients who come to me for SEO help have is their title tags. For those not versed in html coding, there is a tag in your code that says <title> then has some words and closes with </title>. Most businesses are putting their company name in this tag and maybe a “Welcome to my website!“ The text that is in this tag appears at the top of the browser window. The problem with this tag is that most people fill it with worthless text that doesn’t benefit their site. Search ANY keyword you want in Google and you’ll see that the keyword you searched for is in the title tags of everyone on the first page of the search results. And Google even highlights them by bolding the text.
Putting “Welcome to the my Company” in the title tag is costing you greatly. Google looks at the title tag heavily. SEO guru Brad Fallon used the title tag trick early on to rank for “Coolest Guy On The Planet“. No one else had put that in their title tag and the result was that when someone searched Google for “Coolest guy on the planet“, he came up number one because he was the only one nutty enough to actually put that text in his tags. In your case, you are probably competing for something a little more widely used like a dentist office or maybe greeting cards. So let’s look at a couple things with the title tag.
First thing to say about the title tag is that every character is golden. Use your title tag for keywords only. I can’t stress this enough. Don’t use your company name, don’t say “Welcome to..”, etc. It’s a waste. If they’re on your website, they will see your company name and you can use your meta tags to welcome them if you must (that will be discussed in Step 3), so again, only use keywords in your title tags. There are arguments that using your company name promotes branding, but my vote is to ignore that advice.
Here are three programs you can use to find out what the best keywords are to chase for your business.
- http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- or download the Good keyword Tool Here.
Make your list and then you can proceed with wild abandon.
Assuming you’ve done that, let’s pretend that your business is greeting cards, use one of those programs to look to see what people are actually searching for. Pick out the top 20 or so and then analyze each page of your website to see where the best fit is for those keywords.
To start, if the service you provide is local, then you have a good advantage because you can use keywords like “Atlanta Dentist“, or if that’s proving too competitive, then you can use your county name like “Gwinnett County Dentist“. But you’ll use your top 3 or 4 general keywords on your home page title tag. So instead of your title tag saying “Welcome to my website”, it would say something like “Atlanta Dentist | Gwinnett Dentist | Atlanta Dentistry“. This way Google knows that the page is about dentistry.
The other trick is that each of your pages should almost serve as a “home page”. So it’s not just that first main page that people could come to, but any of your pages. So make sure that you do NOT copy the title tag from your home page onto all of your pages. That will have a negative effect and accomplish nothing for you. Make the title tag on your page on orthodontics contain orthodontic keywords. Each page should be different. For pages that are what we refer to as “no money” pages like your terms and conditions, privacy policy, contact page, etc, just use the most general keywords from your list. Be sure to mix them up. The other thing to be careful about is that the page actually is about what you indicate in the title tags. So if you have dentistry keywords in your title tag, make sure that page is about dentistry. Having mention of those specific keywords from the title tag in the actual text of the page is important.
Businesses that aren’t local are a little tougher because your products can be purchased from anywhere by anyone and is not strapped to a locality. You don’t get the benefit of using a location in front of your keyword. Atlanta dentistry is pretty competitive, but nowhere near as competitive as just dentistry by itself. You’ll want your keywords to focus on some of the low hanging fruit. In the greeting cards example, maybe you’d want to focus on “sympathy greeting cards”, “my first birthday greeting cards”, etc. Those are less competitive than the broad “greeting cards” which you can use on your no money pages.
We’ll touch on title tags more heavily later off and on in various lessons because you can’t just use them willy-nilly. Google is more interested in relevance and if you’re keywords don’t match what’s actually on the page, you’ll fail miserably. Yes, content is king no matter how cliche it may be.
