After making a quick check online,you will find that many businesses do not have a page title on the home page of their website,and often when they do,they make some common mistakes. As a result,I thought I’d share some quick tips on what to do when thinking about the page title.
It is your title tag that is the MAIN thing that search engines use to determine what your page is about. If you don't have it,they will have to rely on the first few lines of your content. There is absolutely no good reason not to have a title for every page of your website.
Note:These tips are not intended for coming up with titles for blog articles. Those titles have a different purpose. I’m talking here primarily about the title for the home page of your business website.
Quick Tips On Effective Home Page Titles
Have A Title:This one is obvious,but you’d be amazed how many people don’t have a page title at all. The <title>tag goes in the <head>area of the web page. It is also the active link that is show when your page comes up in the search results. Look at the source code any major website and you’ll see how it looks in the code. I cannot think of any reason why you wouldn’t want a title on every single page,but you especially want to provide one for the home page of your site.
Don’t Make It Just Your Company Name:Many business websites simply set the title of the page to their company name. This use of your title tag does very little to help search engine rank your site for what you are wanting searchers to find your site for. The title is one of the most important pieces of information and is a key factor in your search engine rankings. Unless you are wanting to rank for your company name more than everything else,I wouldn’t use your company name as the title. You are much better off using it to describe what you do while incorporating the keyword phrase you are wanting to rank for. For example,this site uses “Austin SEO| Austin Marketing For Small Business Web Marketing” as the primary title of the home page.
Early Words Matter More:Even if you do put your company name in the title,it is better to lead with the key phrases you want to rank for. This is what we do most of the pages of AustinSEOAcademy.com as well. You'll also find that ranking your website for local searches is even better and easier to do if your business is classified as a "Local Business."
Fight Battles You Have A Chance Of Winning:When competing for search rankings make sure you pick key phrases that are not only relevant for your business,but also not so competitive that you don’t have any chance of ranking well for them. For example,unless you are really confident (after having done some good keyword research),don’t compete on phrases like “luxury travel.” Instead,go for something narrower like "Atlanta Luxury vacation condos". A good key phrase is determined by a combination of relevancy to the business,level of search volume and the degree of competition for the phrase. The tool I use to narrow down my best keywords quickly and accurately is Market Samurai.
Don’t Make It Too Long: You really don't need to try to squeeze to many words into their title. Though you can use as many as 60 characters in your title but there is no advantage to gain from using all 60. The point is you are wanting to attract the attention of your prospective customer or visitor and communicate to the search engines exactly what your page is about.
No Special Characters: Limit yourself to words,numbers and simple punctuation (hyphen,colon,etc.)
That’s pretty much all there is to it. This is not rocket science,so you don't need to sweat this,but you do need to optimize this. A whole bunch of your competitors have not and just by getting yours set up properly,you'll find yourself ahead of most of them.
