Title Tag Crucial in Boosting your Search Rankings

Categorized | General

Title Tag Crucial in Boosting your Search Rankings

Written by: Jaron Phillips | Posted on 16 November 2009. Tags: start-up, web site design

The title tag of your webpage is the one major on-page element that can really make a difference to your search engine rankings.

I’ve been experimenting with this for several months now – by ever so slightly tweaking my page titles and watching my Google rankings go up… and also down!

Search engines take the information from your meta title tag and display this as part of the blue “clickable” link entry for your site in search engine result pages. Words in the title become bolded if they appear in the user’s search query. This page title becomes the critical element for helping search engine robots identify the contents of your page and index them. As well as telling both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is about, the title tag demonstrates the quality and relevance of your website and plays a crucial role in achieving rankings.

I’ve been able to demonstrate this using our default parked page over at Cheeky Monkey Hosting. The experimental test page is not linked internally from anywhere in the site. My aim was to get ranked for the search phrase “cheap web hosting provider”. The phrase receives just under 100 searches a day so I inserted this phrase into my meta title tag, inside the <title> tag within the <head> tag of the HTML document, and well… you can see the result!

Click on image for larger view

Interestingly, the word “cheap” does not appear anywhere in the text of the webpage so this first place ranking is spurred purely from the page’s title tag. What this means for business owners is that significant weight is placed on the meta title tag and you can manipulate your pages to achieve the best result!

Here’s some tips to boost your search engine rankings:

Insert 2 or 3 sets of your chosen keyword phrases into each webpage’s title
The closer the keyword is to the start of your title, the more heavily weighted it is as a keyword – this means that the most important keyword phrase should be first
Don’t repeat the keyword numerous times in the title as you may be penalised
Avoid the use of stop words such as “a”, “and”, “or” and “that”
Avoid the use of special characters in the title text: ‘ ” < > { } [ ] ( )
Beware of the 69 character limit in Google (including spaces) – your title will be truncated at the 70 character mark so you should work to this limit when writing your titles

Google’s official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide details some good
practices for page title tags:

Accurately describe the page’s content – Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.
Create unique title tags for each page – Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
Use brief, but descriptive titles – Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, Google will show on only a portion of it in the search result.

Finally, use your titles to grab attention – include a call to action and get the click!

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This post was written by:

Jaron Phillips - who has written 8 posts on Business Blogs.

Jaron Phillips is the co-owner of Cheeky Monkey Hosting which specialise in hosting websites from around the South Pacific. He entered the industry after looking for a web hosting solution for his own online ventures and ended up launching an internet business.

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4 Responses to “Title Tag Crucial in Boosting your Search Rankings”

Sheldon (Marketing Consultant, Tauranga) says:

November 17, 2009 at 8:52 pm

Damn it Jaron, here you are giving away my SEO secrets for free again!

Reply
Jaron Phillips says:

November 18, 2009 at 9:13 am

ha ha! Just one strategy of many to wet the appetite! Talk to Sheldon for more tips just like this technique to see some really amazing results in the SERPs! I know he’ll have plenty more up his sleeve…

Reply
Andy Fling says:

November 28, 2009 at 3:42 am

Nice post! Overuse of keywords can have two negative effects on the success of your website: 1) Search engines know what you are doing and may penalize you for it; and 2) Search engines are not your target market – people are. If you write for people, people are more likely to find value in what you wrote, recommend what your wrote to a friend, and come back again to see what else you wrote.

Reply
Keithw says:

November 30, 2009 at 9:53 am

Interesting that the search results are so good simply on the title.
I had noticed something similar but not tested it.

Reply