There are a lot of little details involved in SEO. Some matter more than others, but when they are easy to implement even the minor ones can be worthwhile.
Titling your page well is one of those small things, but it’s important. It only takes a moment, but it can please both search engines and users.
One of the most common mistakes I see is people not giving their pages any title at all. This is really annoying when someone wants to bookmark your page and there is no title to differentiate it from other bookmarks. Skipping a title entirely is perhaps one of the worst things you can do from both viewpoints.
Or perhaps not. Even more annoying can be the keyword stuffed, excessively long titles that make no sense. These kinds of titles just look spammy and give your site the appearance of being low in quality. You don’t want to overdo your titles either.
So what do you do?
You want your title to use relevant keywords yet be attractive to visitors. There’s a balancing act here. Sometimes the title that is less attractive on a SEO level will be more appealing to visitors.
You can include your site name on every page if you like for branding purposes. This is very commonly done on blogs. It can be a good thing, but think about what you want to emphasize. Most people feel that the first thing that appears in a title has the most SEO impact.
If you really want that branding, add your site’s name to the end of the page title rather than the beginning. There is generally no need to emphasize your site branding over SEO. If you’re getting searches for your site name, maybe the branding is worthwhile, but not so much otherwise.
No, your page title is not the most important thing to consider as you optimize your site. But it is relevant and simple to do.
Technorati Tags: page title, seo, website optimization, branding
Does onpage really matter all that much? All I ever seem to hear about is links, links, links.
I sometimes will make posts and publish them to get the right keywords in the link. Then go back and change the post title to make it more interesting. Like say i am talking about “blue jeeps” I will make the title “blue jeeps”, write the post, and publish it. Then I will go in and edit the title to make it more eye catching. So “blue Jeeps” will be in the url, but the title of the post will be something else.
Links are #1 for getting indexed, Corrina, but there are a lot of small on page things you can do. Keywords is what’s most important. Using relevant keywords as much as possible in your posts AND getting linked with those keywords.
There’s a little trick to that you may want to know, Jimi. It looks like you use WordPress, in which case all you have to do is make “blue-jeeps” your post slug, and make your title whatever you like. The post slug should appear as URL instead of the post title.