Are you looking to increase your rankings in Google? A quick tweak to your SEO title tag can go a long way in accomplishing this. When doing an initial on-site audit of a website one of the first things to inspect is the title tag of the page. Here are a couple of reasons for doing this:
- It has the most SEO power of any tag on the page in regards to establishing a keyword.
- It gives a brief description of what you are viewing on the page.
- Search engines assign large amounts of SEO value to the tag’s content.
When reviewing the code of a page look for the title tag on each page. Ensure that the tag is relevant to the content that is already on the page. Write down suggestions during an inspection for making it both friendly for users and search engine crawlers.
You now know some of the important aspects and power of the SEO title tag. Next we need to follow some steps to optimize them. Below are some tips to follow when inspecting the tags on websites:
Avoid keyword stuffing
Using the same word or phrase several times is not going to fool those search engine crawlers. They are smart enough to realize what the motive is when doing this and will act accordingly. Penalties are sure to follow.
Avoid duplicating the title tag and h1 tag
They both are supposed to give descriptions of the content that is on the page and they both help establish keyword relevancy for a page. However, search engine crawlers do not take kindly to duplicate content.
Use only one title tag per page
This may seem like common sense, but there are web-pages that either use multiple ones or don’t have any at all. If this were the case then it would negate all of the value of the title tag.
Brand the title tag
The tag of the web-page should include the brand name in it.
Use synonyms
When selecting title tags and keywords use synonyms to help find less competitive phrases or words to rank on. Search engines can easily associate and return relevant results.
Use Long-tail phrases
If you are in a competitive industry then using long-tail phrases to target customers could help. For example, if your keyword is “cars for sale”, you could include the city or state to make it more specific for your customers. Instead use “cars for sale rochester ny” or even more specific like “honda cars for sale rochester ny”. These little adjustments could help target local customers.
These are just a couple of tips to consider when looking at a SEO title tag. The value of title tags can not be forgotten and it is important to ensure they are being optimized on each page of a website. These are easy fixes and will assist in establishing rankings in search engines.