SEO: How To Write a Good Title Tag

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SEO: How To Write a Good Title Tag

Unlike Willy Wonker’s Candy Factory, Google will not be handing out golden tickets to their algorithm anytime soon. And for those of us who are looking to build a successful SEO campaign, hard work, persistence and research still remains inevitable.

What we do know is that an effective SEO campaign rests on a variety of factors. From the mouth of Google we know that they use “more than 200 signals, including their patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and to determine which pages are most important”

There are however a few tried and tested techniques that you can incorporate into your SEO campaign. But, keep in mind that SEO is an endurance race and often the results are only visible after a while. And by this we do mean a while….

On-site optimisation: The Title Tag

On-site optimisation by itself won’t get you to the first page of Google but it is important. Looking at the Title tag, it’s easy to see how people can make one of two mistakes. Either they suffer from “tweakophobia” (a term coined by Econsultancy blog writer Jaamit Durrani) or they are constantly tweaking their title tag and not giving it enough time to yield the desired result. Whichever the case, it’s always important to maintain a balanced outlook when doing on-site SEO.  Making changes to your title tag can be a good thing, especially if it’s the right type of changes.

Here are a few tips for writing a good title tag:

Know your targeted key phrase for each page and create your title tag around it
Do a Google search and refer to other sites that are ranking well for that specific key phrase. It’s always worth finding out what those “first page rankers” are doing right.
Use your targeted key phrase in the front of your title tag
Avoid using a generic set of title tags throughout your entire site. Google has never been fond of duplicated content.
Make each page’s title tag and meta information unique and specific to the content on that page
The title shouldn’t exceed 7, maximum 8 words or 64 characters. Google only shows the first 64 characters in the search results pages.
Keep your title tag readable. Like any headline, the title should grab the attention of the user and lead them to information that is relevant to the title tag.
Decide whether you want to use the “pipe” symbol, hyphen or comma in your title.  Some people believe that the “pipe” symbol commands more attention whereas others prefer the hyphen.  Once again, looking at the different pages that are displayed on the first page of Google always helps.

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