Are you looking for some tips to quickly improve your website’s SEO? One important factor that is commonly overlooked is your page titles.
By using a few little page title SEO tips to optimize your titles, you have the potential to see improvements in your website’s organic search ranking and traffic.
7 Page Title SEO Tips to improve Ranking – Summary
- Keep page titles to about 55 – 60 characters long
- Use target keywords in titles
- Describe your page content in the best way possible
- Use words like HOW, WHY, WHAT and WHERE as well as BEST REVIEW and ULTIMATE
- Write unique titles, no duplicates
- Use your brand name wisely
- Keep it simple
What is a Page Title?
The Page Title is the clickable title of the webpage that shows in the search engine results. In WordPress, this is automatically set when you name your page. The result is usually <blog name> <separator> <page title>. However, using a plugin such as Yoast SEO can give you greater control over your page title creation.
Page titles are important because they tell people and search engines what the topic of the content on your webpage is. They also tell search engines how relevant a page is to a searcher’s query. That’s why page titles should accurately reflect the page’s content.
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Keep page titles to about 55 – 60 characters long
Finding the right page title length is crucial for SEO optimization. Too short and there will not be enough information for the search engine, or searcher, to determine the relevance of the content. However, if the page title is too long it will not be fully displayed in the search engine results. The optimum length for page titles is between 55-60 characters.
Use target keywords in page titles
Since search engines use page titles to determine relevance to the searcher’s query it is important to make sure your target keywords appear in the title. The trick is to keep the title clever and not appear to be ‘keyword stuffing’.
Describe your page content in the best way possible
Another one of the page title SEO tips is that your page title should describe what is on the page while including the target keyword, while also triggering an emotion or thought from the reader. The same rules that apply to create great headline writing also apply to write page titles: ‘numbers, simplicity, and trigger words’.
Use emotional trigger words
A great headline and page title will grab the reader’s attention and compel them to click and view the content of the page. Using emotional trigger words such as HOW, WHAT, WHY and WHERE give people an idea of what the page content is about and whether it answers their search intent. Other highly effective trigger words include adjective like BEST, REVIEW, ULTIMATE.
Write unique titles, no duplicates
One of the most common page title SEO related mistakes websites make is to have duplicate titles. Having duplicate page titles can confuse search engines about which pages to rank, which can lead to lower rankings. So change it up a little bit.
Use your brand name wisely
Brand awareness can be a very crucial part of your website search strategy. Many websites include the website or company name in the page title. If you are not careful, this can lead to duplicate page titles. Make sure you use a little creativity when including the website or company name in the page title.
Keep it simple
Above all, make sure to keep it simple. Remember that you are writing primarily to real people, the search engines pick up clues from the page title and content. Trying to get too technical with how you create page titles and the underlying content can confuse readers and lead to low PageRank scores.
Tools to help improve page title SEO
SEMRush SEO Ideas – This tool from SEMRush checks if you have a keyword in your title and meta tag and offers suggestions if you don’t. Just enter a target keyword and this tool provides you with a detailed list of actionable, tailor-made optimization tips for each page of your website.
Yoast Plugin for WordPress – This plugin checks your on-page SEO, offers suggestions for page titles and descriptions, and even features a snippet editor to test out how your result will look in Google.
See our list of blogging tools we recommend.
This content was condensed from an article written by Luke Harsel that originally appeared here.
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