Basic SEO

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.

My site has a nice human friendly link trail which robots follow easily. All my pages get indexed without ever submitting more than the main index page once.

Search Engine Optimization and Web Usability Considerations in Creating Title Tags

The perfect title will balance all four purposes described above and will meet the technical guidelines explored below:

1. All titles should be typed in Title Case (or Proper Case). This is the most often overlooked error we've found when using the web. An excellent resource for learning title case capitalization rules is Writer's Block - Writing Tips - Capitalization in Titles. By the way, your headers should be using Title Case as well.

There are exceptions to the Title Case or Proper Case rule. In the case of FAQ pages, it is allowable to use the original question as the title to the page. In that case, title case is not necessary.

2. For nonfiction or reference websites, titles should be written to clearly indicate what is available on the page.

3. Every page must have a unique title. Do not put the same title on every page of your website. (See purpose 3 above.)

4. The title must be able to stand on its own and clearly communicate the contents of the page to the reader. You must give the reader context. A title like "Home" or "About Us" when displayed in search results or bookmarks tells the reader nothing about the contents of the page. Remember, the reader is simply seeing a list of titles. When a visitor bookmarks your site or adds your site to their favorites menu, the title of your page becomes the title of their bookmark. Think about your own bookmarks. How many times have you had to edit the titles so that you would know what your bookmark contained? Jacob Nielsen provides some good illustrative examples of strong and weak titles as well as general tips in his article, Microcontent: Headlines and Subject Lines (Alertbox Setp. 1998).

5. Home page titles present unique requirements. The home page introduces your organization and is almost always your best contender in a search engine optimization contest. Home page titles should clearly indicate what is available on the page, AND for the purpose of web credibility they should clearly indicate what organization is represented on the page. In other words, you need to include the name of your organization in the title tag of your home page! Not doing so can significantly lower your Web credibility.

Web Page Title Tag Limits (Maximum Lengths)

The W3C, in their page W3C - The TITLE element in HTML, states: "The title should ideally be less than 64 characters in length. That is, many applications will display document titles in window titles, menus, etc where there is only limited room." A 64 character limit is a good starting place, but oversimplifies things a bit.

Google will display up to 66 characters of a title tag, cropping to complete words. For example, the following title is exactly 68 characters, so Google leaves off the last word in the title when displaying the website in its search results:

68-Character Title Tag: Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization and Web Usability
Google Display: Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization and Web ...

On the other hand, if the word "and" were replaced with an ampersand, the title would be exactly 66 characters, and would be displayed in full:

66-Character Title Tag: Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization & Web Usability
Google Display: Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization & Web Usability

Google isn't the only thing to consider when deciding on the optimal title tag limit. Yahoo! has an absolute cutoff in presenting titles of exactly 120 characters, which is substantially longer and gives the webmaster much more room to present longer titles. If your title exceeds 120 characters, the title will simply be cropped, whether the display title ends in a complete word or not. That is quite different from Google, which ends the display title with the last complete word which ended before the 66 character limit was reached.

The best strategy for creating a long title is to make sure that the title works for both Google and Yahoo. The optimal title tag should be thought of as consisting of a primary title (for Google) and a secondary title (for Yahoo!). Your primary title length should be limited to 66 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Your secondary title can be any length up to the point where the full title reaches 120 characters in length. You can create a longer title if you wish, but be aware that anything beyond 120 characters will be cropped in the Yahoo! search results, and no one will ever see it.

The Roles of the Title Tag in a Web Page

Title tags play four roles on the Internet:

1. First, the title is used by resource librarians, directory editors, and other webmasters when they link to your page. If you present editors with a well written title, your site will be reviewed faster and will get favorable treatment by the editors. If you submit a page with a title like this, "Title Tags - Title Tag Limit - Title Tag - Web Page Title - HTML Title Tags," then you can expect to wait for a review.

2. Second, the title is displayed in the search results as the most prominent piece of information available to searchers. Taking the example above, put yourself in the mind set of a search engine user who is scanning the search results. If you see a title like the one above, which is so obviously stuffed with frequently searched keyword phrases, don't you think you would consider that the Webmaster is trying a bit too hard to get your attention, putting search engine optimization far above web usability? We think so.

3. Third, the title is displayed by the visitor's browser (most often Microsoft Internet Explorer) in the border of the viewable screen as the visitor is viewing your website. This serves as an anchor so that the visitor knows where he or she is on your website. For this reason, titles need to clearly relate to their page and should include bread crumb or mouse trail information if there is space available. Microsoft's browser, called Internet Explorer, displays the first 95 characters of your title tag. For title tags longer than 95 characters, Internet Explorer will simply crop the tag, as you can see it has done to the title of this Web page.

4. Fourth, the title is used by the major search engines as the most important piece of information available in order to help them determine the topic of your page, and thus to determine the ranking of your page in their search results. Given that the title is the most important factor in your page's ranking, it can be very tempting to load the title tag with keywords. For the first three reasons mentioned above, you should avoid the temptation.

Search Engine Optimization Tips

Johnson and Smith Dallas CPAs

However, there’s more than enough space in the title tag to include both of these important keyword phrases. (I like to use about 10-12 words in my title tags.)


One way to do it would be like this:
Johnson and Smith - Dallas Tax Accountants - CPAs in Dallas, TX

I’ve always liked the method of separating phrases with a hyphen; however, in today’s competitive marketplace, how your listing appears in the SERPs is a critical aspect of your SEO campaign. After all, if you have high search engine rankings but your targeted buyers aren’t clicking through, it won’t do you much good.

These days I try to write compelling titles as opposed to simply factual ones, if I can. But it also depends on the page, the type of business, the targeted keyword phrases, and many other factors. There’s nothing wrong with the title tag in my above example. If you were looking for a tax accountant in Dallas and saw that listing at Google, you’d probably click on it.

Still, you could make it a readable sentence like this:



Johnson and Smith are Tax Accountants and CPAs in Dallas, TX

I’m not as thrilled with that one because I had to remove the exact phrase "Dallas Tax Accountants," as it wouldn’t read as well if it said:

Johnson and Smith are Dallas Tax Accountants and CPAs in Dallas, TX

It sounds redundant that way, as if it were written only for the search engines.

In the end, it’s really a personal preference. Don’t make yourself crazy trying to create the perfect title tag, as there’s just no such thing. Most likely, either of my examples would work fine. The best thing to do would be to test different ones and see which rank higher and which convert better. It may very well be that the second version doesn’t rank as well, but gets clicked on more, effectively making up the difference.



Use Your Visible Text Copy As Your Guide
I prefer not to create my title tags until the copy on the page has been written and optimized. I need to see how the copywriter integrated the keyword phrases into the text to know where to begin. If you’ve done a good job with your writing (or better yet, hired a professional SEO copywriter), you should find all the information you need right there on your page. Simply choose the most relevant keyword phrases that the copy was based on, and write a compelling title tag accordingly. If you’re having trouble with this and can’t seem to get a handle on what the most important phrases are for any given page, you probably need to rewrite the copy.

I recommend that you *don’t* use an exact sentence pulled from your copy as your title tag. It’s much better to have a unique sentence or a compelling string of words in this tag. This is why you have to watch out for certain development tools. Some content management systems (CMS) and blog software such as WordPress automatically generate the title tag from information you provide elsewhere. In WordPress, for example, the default is to use your blog name, plus whatever you named the page. The problem is that this same info is also used as the headline, plus in the navigational link to the page. Depending on your setup, it could also be the URL for that page. Very rarely would you want all those to be the same.

The good news is that most of today’s CMS and blog software have workarounds so that you can customize your title tags. For WordPress, I recommend installing the "SEO Title Tag" plug-in developed by Stephan Spencer. It works like a charm on all my WordPress sites.