SEO Title Optimization

When we perform an SEO audit for a website, we analyze the on-page and off-page characteristics that search engines use to generate their rankings. One of the most important on-page characteristics of any Web page is its title because it very succinctly summarizes the page’s content. Users use this information to help them decide if they want to read the rest of the page’s content, and search engines use it to help determine the relevance of the page to various search queries. Consequently, SEO title optimization is extremely important for any SEO campaign. In this video, we provide a few simple examples to help you improve your titles:

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to Gnome Tips! Today we will discuss SEO title optimization.

A page’s title is very important because it briefly describes the page’s content, and it’s the first thing users see in the search engine results pages. In this example, we see our homepage’s title, which is, “SEO, SEM, and Internet marketing consulting” followed by a pipe character and our company name. Now, let’s go to the page and see where the title actually comes from.

Once we’re there, we can right click on the screen and select “View Page Source” to view the page’s HTML. In the HTML, the title is sitting in the head section inside a title tag. I’ve highlighted it to make it stand out.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s look at how to optimize a homepage title for a fictional pet grooming company called, “Pampered Pets.” We’ll begin with a terrible example, and then, we’ll iteratively improve it.

Here we see one of the worst possible titles you can use: the notorious “Untitled” title. This title gives no information about the page’s content so it will not rank well in the search engines. And even if it does appear in the search results, it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will click on it.

Clearly, Pampered Pets needs a better title or else they’ll never get any online traffic. So let’s try again.

In this example, we’ve used the company name as the page’s title. This is clearly an improvement; however, now, we’re only targeting searches for the company name. If someone’s searching for the company’s offerings such as “pet grooming” or “pet products,” it’s not clear that this title is relevant.

And that makes us sad. Let’s take one more stab at it.

Here we have a nice, optimized title that incorporates the company’s offerings as well as the company’s name.

Finally, we have a title that makes everyone happy!

Thank you for watching this edition of Gnome Tips. To learn more about Search Engine Optimization, visit our website at www.webgnomes.org.