SEO Title Tags

The title tag is undoubtedly one of the most important components of SEO. If your title tag isn’t configured properly, it’s going to be very difficult to rank well for the keywords you want to rank for.

The title tag of an HTML document is found in the head, between the <title> and </title> tags. It should contain keywords, but you shouldn’t stuff the title full of dozens of meaningless keywords. Ideally, your title should have just two or three phrases, up to around 160 characters or so.

What I like to do with my title tags is to insert one main keyword phrase, then another similar phrase that uses some of the same words, but not all. Let’s look at an example title.

Improve Your Golf Swing | Golf Swing Tips

I’ve included my main keyword phrase first (Improve Your Golf Swing), and then I’ve included a secondary keyword phrase (Golf Swing Tips) that includes two of the four words from the first phrase. You’ll also notice that the two phrases are separated by the | or pipe symbol. This could also be a dash, an asterisk, or one of several symbols. I just prefer to use the pipe symbol and it works for me.

Some people like to put the name of their site in the title of every page. While you CAN do this, I don’t recommend it unless the name of your site is related to the topic of every single page. For example, if you have a site called GolfSwingTips.com, and every single article on the site was about improving a player’s golf swing, then you could probably safely put “Golf Swing Tips” in your title. If your site was called GolfMania.com, you might not want to put “Golf Mania” in every title tag.

Whatever you do, do NOT leave the title tag blank. If you do, it will show up as “Untitled Document” in the search engines. Not only are you not likely to rank this way, but you aren’t likely to get many clicks through to your site, either.