Title Tags: Best Practice

The title tags on your pages should appeal to two readers; people and robots. Title tags can do wonders for your SEO when optimised with the right keywords and a well-written title holds the power to pique the interest of the reader.

To rank well in the SERPs, you need to optimise your page titles for the search engines. If you want to boost your rankings , you need to pay attention to SEO title optimization. Its an easy way to get an edge over your competitors.

When you look something up in a search engine, you get a list of results that appear as snippets. The SEO title is part of the snippet together with, at least, a URL and a meta description. The titles are the main thing users see when they search something on Google or any other search engine.

How to optimise title tags

When writing your title tag for SEO purposes, one of the first things you have to keep in mind is that the title has to be short. Take a look at your competitors and see how they are doing it. Better still, take a look at the pages that are ranking in the top 10 search results as they will have probably gone through this process already.

It's good to be mindful of how your titles appear in search results, but there are no penalties for using a long title. Keep in mind that longer titles may work better for social sharing in some cases, and some titles are just naturally long. Too short titles might not grab the users attention either.

With a little time and effort, you can boost your rank and your traffic simply by optimising your title tags for SEO. The following checklist will put you in good stead when optimising your page titles:

• Put in your most relevant and desired keywords you want to rank for in the title, but dont overdo it.
• Place the keyword toward the beginning as much as possible.
• Don't use generic titles like Home or Profile to name your pages.
• Be sure to give each page as unique a title as possible.
• Use actions words in your title
• Stay away from all capital letters in your title tag as theyll use up more character space than lower case letters will.
• Add your brand at the end of the title if there is space.

If you have recently changed your title, it might take some time until Google recrawls your page and sees the modification. However, as long as you follow the best practices and include the right keywords in your titles, you shouldnt worry about it.