Whenever you visit a website, you can see the words that are in the blue bar at the top of the website page.  This is called your “title” tag and is displayed either statically (hard coded) from your website or it is generated dynamically (via some sort of content management system.)

Humans generally don’t really read this title tag, but search engines certainly read it.  The page titles do show up on search engine results, however, whenever your results are displayed.  With that in mind, it makes it imperative that you optimize your pages for both humans and search engines.  It needs to be a well oiled machine.

Here are a few tips for optimizing your page title tags to the best of your ability:

1. It is absolutely necessary to reflect the content of the page.

If you have a website about different types of “dog food”, and your title tag says something about “home repair”, you’re going to run into major problems.

2. Have a different title on every page of your website.

A lot of websites today make the assumption that they need to have the same page titles on every page of their website – but they couldn’t be more wrong.  You need to look at every page of your website as a new opportunity to rank for different keywords, even if they’re similar to the other title tags.

3. Use your target keywords.

The words in the beginning of your title tags have more importance than the words at the end of the title tags.  Use those keywords wisely!

4. Keywords in your title need to be separated by either | or –

This is very important to good SEO.

5. Be BRIEF.

Search engines will give more weight to a 3 work title tag than a 40 word title tag.  Be limited to about 4 keywords, and 70 characters at the absolute most.

6. Keep the human element in mind.

Remember – you want to make your website stand out from the others on the search engines.  Make sure you balance SEO with the human reaction!

7. Leave your company out of it.

99.99% of the time, you’re going to rank in the number 1 spot for your company name anyway, so leave your company name out of it.  It’s a waste of space!