Your title tag is one of the first things that Google crawls. The content of your title tag tells the Google spiders what it is about, and it has something to do with how Google indexes your page.
This is the very reason why you have to do your title tags correctly, especially so if you want to rank that page on Google.
A title tag is the title of your page that is written in H1 in HTML. It is the text that shows in blue in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Today, I will share with you some techniques on how to do your title tag SEO correctly. By the end of this tutorial, I need you to go back to each of your pages and then see which ones need some adjustments.
Tip #1: Define the Page’s Context
Your title tags speak a lot about what your visitor will expect from your content. Taking this into consideration, the first step in optimizing your title tag is to define what the content is about.
Here are some more tips on how to do this:
1. Determining your niche
A niche refers to your website’s field of specialization. This is not the most specific topic that is being talked about; rather, it is the subject where it lies.
For example, a good title tag is “Pros and Cons of Dropshipping”. In this case, the word “dropshipping” is the niche. Without it, search engines and users will find it difficult to understand what specific niche you are writing about.
2. Specifying the main point of the article
Once you have your niche, you can now define the specific terms about the topic of your content. In other words, this is the definitive idea that your article is trying to convey.
In our example, earlier, it is about the pros and cons. This helps search engines decide that your article is about the benefits and disadvantages of dropshipping. That title “Pros and Cons of Dropshipping” is way better than “Should you do dropshipping?”
Your website’s title tag should be kept relevant to your content. Not doing so can increase the bounce rate or the number of people who opt-out of your website.
Tip #2: Build a Sense of Unity within Contents
Do not use the same title tag on your website. Google will see this as spam. Also, do not write about the same topics over and over again. The Google algorithm is now smart enough to understand contents that are similar—you will be tagged for duplication of content and you may get penalized.
The solution for this is to keep them related to each other without repeating keywords too often.
In essence, here are the things that you should consider:
Usually, website pages provide different levels of context. Let’s use an e-commerce store as an example.
A website usually consists of a home page, a category page, and a product page.
The home page contains introductions about your products — its type, functions, best-sellers, and brief descriptions about what it can bring to the reader.
Suppose that your product revolves around skincare, your title tag can be, “Skin Care Products for Your Daily Routine”.
A category page, on the other hand, specifies the types of products that you offer. This can be written as “Face Mask Sets for Night Routines”.
Note that this is more specific when compared to what the home page contains. This will provide the link for the third page which has the products.
For the products page, it will consist of a particular product’s description. For this, your title tag can be set as “Charcoal Face Mask”.
If you analyze the intensities of the titles, you can see that it narrows down the ideas and relates them to each other without using almost the same keywords for each.
This way, you can avoid making your website look spammy.
Tip #3: Conduct Keyword Research
You need to establish visibility, and you can only do this by choosing the right keywords. Take the time to research for keywords that have volume but are low competition.
You can use Google trends to do this for free.
Google Trends by Google is one of the most effective tools for keyword research. The data you see here are all taken from the database of Google. You can find out how keywords are trending for as far back as 2004.
Your other alternatives are SEMrush, Answer the Public, AHREFs, and many more.
You should not skip this step. It does not make sense using keywords in your title tag when nobody is looking for them.
Use Unique Keywords
After doing your keyword research, you will come up with a draft of potential keywords. However, you should not use all of them. Just choose the best ones that are likely to give you a good return of traffic.
Here are some tips for using the right keywords:
1. Consider long-tail versions of your keyword
Chances are, from your research, you have gathered only short-tail keywords or those with short phrases. You can look or construct a longer variation of it by adding specific details like adjectives, and countable nouns.
For example, if your keyword is “feed a cat”, you can say, “10 Healthy Ways to Feed a Cat”. What happens is that now, you are targeting “feed a cat” plus “healthy cat” and many more.
2. Check if your current title tag has duplicates
There are service providers that let you monitor for duplicate tags. For example, you can use SEMrush and AHREFs to do this. These tools will send you an alert if your title tags have copies. If you find out there are duplicates, change the titles into fresh and unique ones.
Now that you’re all set, you have to figure out how exactly you want the title tag to appear. Below are some things that you should consider:
Tip #4: Use the Right Words
For one, you need to create short titles. You see, search engines cut the titles in the SERPs if they are too long.
Search engines have a specific character count limit for titles. They do not remove the excess characters; rather, they replace it with truncation or ellipses to convey the message.
Keep in mind that this limit consists of about 70 characters. This includes spaces and punctuation marks. Anything longer than this will result in truncations.
You should set your goal, however, to 55-60 characters as this will lessen the chance of having your tags chopped off even on mobile devices.
Avoid unnecessary and repetitive keywords. Put all the most important details at the beginning of the title. Prioritize the context of your content over information like the writers’ name or the brand because this is what site visitors will rely on before clicking your website.
Formulate your title tag in a way that will answer a search query. This is called a response post. It should provide details about what a reader knows and what they’d like to know. For example, you can use the title “What is Dropshipping and How to Get Started” instead of “Dropshipping 101.”
Tip #5: Prioritize Readers over Search Engines
Based on the guidelines above, you may think that search engines are the most important factor in optimizing your title tag.
Search engines are only the systems that rank your website. However, at the end of the day, you will be relying on readers to generate traffic. They are your audience and will greatly affect factors like:
- Traffic and Leads
- Bounce Rate
- Retention Rate
Search engines do play a big part, but you shouldn’t make them the center of your interest. You may rank high on SERPs, but if your title tags do not represent what a user is looking for, you will not get clicks.
Summary
Title tag SEO is an art and a science. You need to do your research to be able to use the correct title tag. Today, you cannot write titles in the same way you write titles for “creative” writing. You need to use data.
In summary, your title tag SEO approach must be based on the right keyword, keyword volume, and proper wording to convey the content of your page.
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