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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Title tags are critical ranking factor that is often overlooked

Title tags are one of the oldest and most effective aspects of any on-page search engine optimization campaign. Writing an effective, optimized title tag only takes a couple of minutes and can have a dramatic impact on your search engine ranking.

Title Tags are a type of Meta Tag that can be found on each page of your website. They are displayed in the header of your browser and also as the main click able link on any search engine results page.

Search engines like Google use these Title tags to determine the relevance of your website to specific keywords and content. As I mentioned above this is one of the most critical on-page ranking factors!

Mistakes to Avoid: Before we go in to strategies for writing an effective title tag, let’s look at some of the key mistakes to avoid. Some common mistakes include:

  • Using your company name as the Title tag
  • Using the same Title tag across multiple pages
  • Missing or blank Title tag text

How to Write an Optimized Title Tag: Writing an optimized title tag can be broken down in to a simple three step process-

  1. Perform keyword analysis to uncover the most suitable keywords for your webpage
  2. Create a short and sweet title tag (70 characters max) that contains these keywords in a readable yet search engine friendly manner.
  3. Repeat this process for all pages within your website.

Even if you don’t have time to perform keyword research, think of some search terms which are relevant to the page and place these in your title tag. If you need to keep your brand or company name there, place it at the end after a couple of your important keywords.

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