Top 10 Best Tips for Title Tag Optimization 2017
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Definition: Title tags—technically called title elements—define the title of a document.
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Title tags are part of the meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML inside the < head> area. Think of title tags like the title of the chapter of a book. It tells people and search engines what your page is about.
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It is the text that appears in the blue bar at the very top of a web browser. A meta title or page title should describe the content on each individual page and should always contain the keyword for which that page was optimized.
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As you can see, it’s crucial that your meta-title makes it clear what the theme of your web page is.
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It’s also important that the primary keywords for the web page are contained within the meta-title.
Here are the Top 10 Tips for Title Tag Optimization are given Below:
1. Length:
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As you all know, search engines will truncate titles in search results that exceed a certain length. For Google, this length is usually between 50-60 characters long, including spaces, or 512 pixels wide.
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If the title is too long, engines will show an ellipsis, “…” to indicate that a title tag has been cut off.
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In the end, it’s usually better to write a great title that converts and get clicks than it is to obsess over length.
2. Enter Keywords Toward the Beginning:
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Your most important words (keywords) need to be first in your title tag, with your least important words being last in the title tag (most to least).
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This tells the search engines that these words were selected for the <title> tag because they best define the overall contents of the page.
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According to testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking—and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results.
3. Keyword Separation:
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You can use pipes (|) to separate important (keyword) phrases in your titles to make them look clean in search results (no commas, underscores, dashes or any other punctuation unless the keyword is written that way).
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It is easier for users to quickly scan your title tag for relevant information when the words in your title tag are separated into two or three different sections by a pipe symbol. This improves usability.
4. Company Name:
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Many SEO firms recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach.
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If your company name is not part of the important (keyword) phrases, put it at the end of the title tag; if it is part of your important words, put it as the first words in the title tag.
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If a brand is well-known enough to make a difference in click-through rates in search results, the brand name should be first.
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If the brand is less known or relevant than the keyword, the keyword should be first.
Muat Read : -> Top 7 Best On Page SEO Techniques for Beginners 2017
5. Use Key Phrases Wherever Possible:
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Keep your important phrases short and simple. Leave out words that would make it read like a sentence. (e.g., and, if, but, then, etc.)
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If your niche is competitive, try using long-tail keywords that are specific to what your target users might type in search engines rather than more competitive keywords.
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Your site’s title tags are more likely to rank high in the SERPs for key phrases, rather than keywords. This also ensures that your site is shown to a target audience in the SERPs.
6. Unique page and Don’t Replicate it
- I have seen many pages in my reviews that have either no <title> tag at all, have multiple <title> tags in the code. All of that is wrong, and negates the potential value of the <title> tag.
- They must be written differently for every page. Don’t mass replicate your title tags.
- If your website consists of over 1000 pages, you can programmatically generate titles, just ensure that they are not identical.
- Always provide handwritten meta title tag content for your home page and other popular pages on your website
- On a well-designed website, you don’t have multiple pages devoted to the same topic over and over again
7. Avoid using stop words
- Stop words are words that carry little to no keyword value. Your best keywords are, grammatically speaking, nouns and verbs, with adjectives in close support.
- But function words are your stop words, which consist of:
- Articles (such as “the”, “an” and “a”)
- Auxiliary verbs (such as “am”, “is”, and “can”)
- Conjunctions (such as “and”, “or”, “but” and “while”)
- Particles (such as “if”, “then”, and “thus”)
- Prepositions (such as “of”, “that”, “on” and “for”)
- Pronouns (such as “he”, “we”, “which” and “her”)
8. Alt Attributes on Images
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Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes.
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In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site.
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The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings.
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In addition, including image alt attributes help the visually impaired who access web sites using a screen reader.
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They can’t see the image, but with a descriptive alt attribute, they will be able to know what your image is.
9. Keyword stuffing
- Using the same word seven times in the <title> tag text is as subtle as a punch in the nose. The search engines certainly see the intended effort made here.
- Keyword stuffing has been criticized so much that even innocently inserting more than two keywords could cause your site to be seen as one of low quality.
- The algorithms are a tad more sophisticated than, “if using a keyword once is good, using it seven times must be seven times better!”
- Such type of attempt to game the system is foolish, and potentially dangerous. If a keyword-stuffed <title> tag is detected, might there be other forms of page spam in the page code? It potentially raises a red flag that prompts a more detailed page review, and if additional spam problems are found, penalties could be levied.
10. Use No More than Two Keywords:
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This tip concerns the readability of the page title and the relevance of the title to the content on the page, rather than the actual number of keywords.
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It is ideal to use one or two keywords in your page title for useability and SEO.
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Some title tags contain many keywords, causing them to look keyword-stuffed, which is a negative ranking signal for search engines.
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Moreover, navigating stuffed keywords in a page title does not make it easy for users to gain a correct picture of the page content, so they may skip it and move to the next search snippet.