Title Tags

By Michelle Glennie, The Partner Marketing Group

What is a title tag?

When updating your website, you don’t want to forget about the all-important ‘title tag’. Title tags are like the title of the chapter of a book: it tells people and search engines what your page is about. Now that you know what a title tag is as well as its purpose, let’s review a quick checklist from search engine watch with some tips to fully optimize these tags for your website:

Checklist to Optimize Your Website

• Length: Title tags should be a maximum of 70 characters long, including spaces.
• 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.)
• Keywords:
  • 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.
  • Separation: Use pipes | to separate important (keyword) phrases (no commas, underscores, dashes or any other punctuation unless the keyword is written that way).
• 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:

About | Important Keywords | Company Name

or

Important Keywords | About Us | Company Name.

For More Tips

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