Title Tags and Best Practices for SEO
Posted by Will Byrd on Wed, Feb 08, 2012 @ 08:44 AM
Title Tags and Best Practices
Coming up with nifty and eye-catching titles for a page can be quite a challenge and if you
find writing effective 140-word posts for Twitter difficult, think half that amount of characters for titles. Undoubtedly the best way to attract visitors via organic traffic is to use this one highly effective on page SEO tactic and keep title tags to 70 characters or less.
Remember that “characters” include everything from spaces to punctuation.
The Importance of Title Tags in the SERPs
Although Google will index more than 70 characters, it depends a lot on keyword placement and other factors. By experimenting with your title tags and the amount of characters you use, you will probably come to conclusion that a 70-character limit is best. Remember you should be writing your titles to attract readers first and search engines second.
If you have a number of posts that you think should have attracted more traffic than they did, try changing the titles to see if organic traffic improves to those pages. Using your knowledge of on page SEO, it will probably make sense when we tell you that using your keywords as close to the beginning of your title as possible will bring the best results. Run an experiment on some of your poorly-performing pages for about 45 days, and you’ll see a difference.
Why Only 70 Characters?
The main reason is that Google only generally displays 70 characters in the SERPs, after that the words are cut off and nobody can see them. Here’s an example of 70 characters exactly: “Has social media been around long enough to be a field of expertise ...” So you do have plenty of characters to work with. If in this example there were further keywords used to attract search engines after the first 70 characters, then that effort was probably wasted. You should be writing to attracts readers, using a keyword they would have used to find your webpage at the beginning of your title.
If you use your keyword as the first word in your title tag then it is the largest on page SEO factor, and this correlation has been holding steady for years and experienced webmasters know it.
Back to Twitter
If you stick to the 70-character rule, you will have no problems at all with Twitter’s 140 character limit. If your title is over 140 words long when your webpage is automatically Tweeted what results is unattractive and hard to comprehend and consequently people will not want to read it, share it, or reTweet it.
70 characters is not a hard-and-fast rule, but if you experiment enough you will see that it’s a good rule of thumb. A few extra characters isn’t going to kill your title tag stone dead but if some of your pages aren’t performing as well as you think they should be, then try tweaking the title and see if there’s an improvement.
Why Write for Users?
If you use a keyword in the title of your page only to attract the search engines, then when someone comes along and opens your page, they are probably going to feel mislead if the content doesn’t correlate with your keyword(s), bumping up your bounce rate. Google wants to provide the best experience for its users and you should comply by providing content relevant to the keyword(s) you use.
Many people are afraid to go back to existing posts and change the titles. Don’t be, by experimenting a little with on page SEO and changing the title tags you may see a flood of organic traffic coming to a page on which you had given up all hope of attracting readers.
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