How to Write Title Tags For Search Engine Optimization!

Today we’re going back to basics! And nothing is more basically important to a site than properly written title tags. You know the ones that used to appear in the little blue bars in your browsers. Most modern browsers try to hide these, though that doesn’t stop them being helpful!

So what is a title tag? Why is it important to SEO, and how do you write the darn things?

Meta Tags:

First let’s talk about meta tags. Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide information about a web page for the search engines and website users.

Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of a HTML document. These elements are the:

Title Tag:

Description

Keywords (No one uses these anymore and you can get spam “points” for overuse on Bing, so just forget them. If you have keyword stuffed “spammy” ones, you probably want to fix those.)

What is a Title Tag?

Title tags are part of the meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML inside the < head> area. Think of title tags like the title of the chapter of a book. It tells people and search engines what your page is about.

Title tags are also part of what makes people decide whether to visit your site when it shows up in the search results. The title tag should contain important keywords to help the search engine determine what the page is about.

Quick Checklist

When you’re writing your title tag what do you need to know? Here’s a quick checklist with some tips on how to write optimized title tags:

Length: Title tags should be a maximum of 70 characters long, including spaces.

Keyword Placement: Your most important words (keywords) need to be first in your title tag, with your least important words being last in the title tag (most to least). However, if you’re working in a language that reads right-to-left, then it is reversed, and it would be least important to most important.

Keyword Separation: Use pipes | to separate important (keyword) phrases (no commas, underscores, dashes or any other punctuation unless the keyword is written that way).

Wording: Keep your important phrases short and simple. Leave out words that would make it read like a sentence. (e.g., and, if, but, then, etc.)

Company Name: If your company name is not part of the important (keyword) phrases, put it at the end of the title tag; if it is part of your important words, put it as the first words in the title tag. Some SEOs will tell you to leave it out. You can leave it in for branding purposes – so people will see the brand and click. This isn’t valid for all sites.

DON’T DUPLICATE Title Tags: They must be written differently for every page. Don’t mass replicate your title tags.

Make It Relevant: Title tags must be written to be descriptive of the content on the page. (e.g., the About Page would be: SEO Keyword.

How to Make Your Content More SEO-friendly!

1.Use headlines and sub-headers-

Using headlines and sub-headers does several things for SEO optimization. First, it makes your writing skimmable and therefore easier to read. People are more likely to share things that are easy to read. Also, having headers and sub-headers increases the keyword saturation.

2.Add links to previous content-

Links to high-quality, reputable websites increases the validity of your own website. The better the links, the higher your page will rank in search results. Also, using credible sources within the body of your text creates trust with your readers.

3.Optimize the length of your article-

Google gives priority to longer articles, but if it’s too long, you’ll lose readers. Your articles should be a minimum of 300 words. While there is no set maximum, in order to maintain reader interest, try to cap them around 700 or 800 words. Keywords should make up 1-2% of the text. So, in a 500-word article, you should include 5-10 keywords.

4.Choose your keywords wisely-

Before you ever sit down to write your article, decide which keywords you want to incorporate. You can either pay a marketing service to do this for you, or you can choose the keywords based on the results of planned keyword searches. If you haven’t done this process just yet, you should start with this guide to keyword research. When you start writing, use the keywords in the title, headers, tags, and main text.

5.Optimize your images-

Images are essential to making your content interesting and shareable. People are far more likely to purchase from a company whose website has attractive and relevant photos. You can optimize the photos by adding keywords to the image files and providing the ALT tags. Make sure to also optimize the size of the photo. Pictures that are too large will slow load time and hurt the SEO. Make the image as small as possible without compromising the visibility or quality.

6.Make the content shareable-

So, you’ve successfully managed to write an SEO-friendly content rich, interesting article that people want to read. The next step is to make it shareable. Websites like ShareThis and AddThis make it easy to add social media buttons to your website so people can share the content easily.

7.Write high-quality content-

This one should be pretty self-evident, but it isn’t always applied. The best way to get people to read and engage with your content is to write content that is useful and entertaining. Search engines reward sites that have high-quality, relevant content. Quality is more important than almost every other factor on the list.

Once you have a strong idea in mind for how you’d like to write and format your content, consider using some of the following tools to simplify and improve the writing process.