Writing Effective Page Title in Search Engine Optimisation

The page title remains one of the most important ranking factors in search engine optimisation success. Search engines place a lot weight on HTML page titles when classifying the relevancy of your pages. Creating optimised page titles is certainly the one of the most important changes that you can make on your website.

A successful page title is all about writing with search engines in mind whilst including keywords that people search for.

What is a Page Title?

The page title is an HTML tag which is placed within the head area of an HTML document and it should look like this:

<title>Just Search - Search Engine Optimisation  Services</title>

The text enclosed within this small piece of HTML code is shown at the browsers top bar. Most search engines also use the page title as the title in their SERPs.

What you should (or shouldn’t) include in the Page Title?

• Always include something in the Page Title – You should never leave it as “Untitled Document” which is used as default by most WYSIWYG editors.
• You should have a unique page title for each page on your website.
• You should never use stop words such as: ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘for’, ‘by’, etc…
• You should separate each phrase with a dash (-) or pipe (|) character.
• Try not use more than 64 characters.
• Try to place your target keywords at the begging, middle and at the end of the page title.
• Most importantly make your page title readable and attractive for humans too so that they click through when your site is displayed in SERPs.

It’s not easy writing perfect page titles, from my experience it’s all about finding the perfect balance between keyword relevancy and/or keyword density, readability and attractiveness so that it stands out from the crowd.

Tino
SEO Programmer