Title-tags for dummies? SEO basics explained

Title-tags for dummies? How to explain basic SEO concepts to your clients and prospects

Sun, Jun 8, 2008

teaching Title tags for dummies? How to explain basic SEO concepts to your clients and prospects Us SEOs really enjoy talking to our online marketing brethren about the latest and greatest in search engine land.

We are an easy crowd. We even have our own social media site.

It turns into a different ball game when you talk to your clients and prospects. They don’t have the time, don’t have the knowledge and perhaps don’t even WANT to know what you have to say. But still, they need to be convinced and educated about the ‘SEO ways’ to turn a website into a success in the SERPs.

So how to do that? Below, I’ve written an example that explains the basic concept of title-tags (a.k.a. meta-titles), how to write them, and some common issues. My goal is not to teach you, valued fellow-SEO, about title-tags, but explain this concept as efficiently as possible to (imaginary) clients.

The story is based on the following ideas:

start with a visual representation of the goal we want to reach. A graph going up usually does the trick;
Keep It Simple, Stupid. Clients are NOT interested in theory. They want practical guidelines that actually work for them (’what’s in it for me’);
provide examples, examples, examples…

So, here is my ‘title-tags for dummies’ post. Please let me know if you think if it’s incomplete, too difficult, or anything else. Please read it through the eyes of someone who does not know what a title-tag is. Thanks!

Let’s get down to business.

What the bleep is a title-tag?

The title-tag is the most important text on a single webpage when it comes to SEO.

Writing good title-tags is essential for getting results in the search engines:

Does this grab your imagination? This is what happened a while ago with the website of a client of mine. I changed ONE title-tag on their homepage and their visits increased sixfold.

Of course, a lot can be said about this graph. You don’t know the statistics behind the graph, the text of the actual title, the subject of the site, and the competition. It’s just here to prove my point: it pays off to optimize title-tags.

When SEOs are talking about ‘title-tags’ or ‘meta-titles’, they refer to the clickable link text in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask:

Searchengineland.com title in SERP

Usually you’ll see the title-tag displayed in the blue upper part of your web browser:

voorbeeld titlebrowser Title tags for dummies? How to explain basic SEO concepts to your clients and prospects

But where you’ll ALWAYS find the title, is in the HTML source. It’s the text snippet in the top op the document between the codes <title> and </title>. (Ask your technician to show it if you don’t know).

voorbeeld titlebroncode Title tags for dummies? How to explain basic SEO concepts to your clients and prospects

Why are title-tags important?

The fact alone that search engines display this tiny bit of the text in their results pages, makes that they are important. This piece of text is your web site’s first impression, so you must make it interesting enough for ’searchers’ to visit. But there is more.

We (the SEOs) know that search engines value the text within the title-tag. If a single page is the Financial District in Manhattan, the title-tag is Wall Street. The words you put into a title-tag are very, very valuable.

The way I see it, is that the title-tag (and the meta-description, which is also shown in the search engines) is like an advertisement for a page, comparable to an Adwords ad. It should contain good keywords, but must also entice users to click. A title can only be ‘good’ when it displays both criteria.

How to write title-tags?

I could write a book about this.

But here is a summary of six practical guidelines you should remember. The title-tag:

starts with the most important keyword;
contains max. 65 characters (including spaces);
and a call to action;
branding names are (usually) mentioned in the end, or not at all;
besides using keywords, a title tag must be compelling enough to click on;
writing style depends on competition and goals (aiming towards CTR or ranking).

1. Start with the most important keyword

This tip is the most logical of them all. But that is probably why so many websites keep doing this wrong.

Start with the keyword you want to rank for with the webpage. But which keyword is that? Let’s just say that this keyword (or keyphrase) is unique for the page to which it belongs. All too often the mistake is made that pages try to rank for keywords that are too competitive, too general, or simply not relevant.

2: 65 characters

Why 65 characters?

Because this is (roughly) the amount of characters that are shown in the SERPs. Let’s look at the example of searchengineland.com. Their title-tag consists of 78 characters.

The title is longer than Google shows, because after ‘Marketing &Search’ we see that Google ends it.

This is not a problem. Google & co. will index it and even use the additional characters. You can make it 300 characters long if you want or need to. But it won’t be displayed.

However, keywords that are used in the beginning of the title weigh heavier. That’s why it is usually better to place your ‘ranking keywords’ in the beginning.

3: call-to-action

The ‘call-to-action’ is a request for the reader to act. In this case, to click the link on a search engine results page.

A very easy way to incorporate a call-to-action in a title is by inserting a question mark after the keyphrase:

'Title-tags for dummies?'

I’ve put ‘Title-tags’ first, because that is the best and official name of, well … title-tags :) The part ‘for dummies’ is not meant to rank, but is meant to provoke clicks. ‘How to explain…’ etc. is an actual description of what this article is about. I chose not to, but could have incorporated the synonym ‘meta-title’ somewhere as well.

4: put branding in the back

The homepages of strong brands usually don’t need many keywords:

Title-tag of Apple.com

But for us mere mortals it’s better to place keywords in our title. Even when it is the homepage, the center of our branding. (What keywords are and how to choose them is beyond the scope of this article.)

5: CTR: click through rate

Like I said before: the title is used to rank higher, but also to entice searchers to visit. This is what we also call ‘CTR improvement’. The higher the percentage of people that click (relative to the actual position in the SERPs) the better.

That is why you shouldn’t insert a lot of keywords into a meta-title without thinking about the effect this has on human readers.

6: Check out the competition

It doesn’t hurt to also check out the competition. Are the titles of competitors (in the search engines, not in real life) over optimized? Are they human readable? Spammy? Relevant for the page they refer to?

Knowing this might help to choose for a certain style of title-tag writing. You can stuff the titles with a lot of keywords to gain rankings or make them more enticing to improve CTR. It depends on the competition and the rankings you already have.

Feedback?

I would really like to receive feedback on this. Are the six tips I chose the most important ones, in your opinion? Are they explained the way they should and is it easily understandable? Just drop a comment and let me know :) Thanks!

Post written by:

Ramon Eijkemans - who wrote 22 posts on SEO copywriting: Searchwritten.

Web developer since 2001, SEO consultant since 2006. You can visit my LinkedIn account to learn more: ramoneijkemans.p.s.; I also run a Dutch blog about SEO and webdesign in general.

31 Comments For This Post

Chris Says:
June 9th, 2008 at 9:54 am

Very useful. After reading this post, being dummies, we decided to change title tags of two websites. Never realised that all our competitors use practically the same two keywords.

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten