Sunday 18 September 2011

Title Tags - Onsite SEO

This is the first chapter in a set of blog posts that are dedicated to page level mark-up for SEO.
So chapter 1 of onsite SEO:

The Title Tag.


If you know everything about the title tag, skip to the advanced usage at the bottom of this blog, hopefully there will still be some value in this post even to the most advanced SEO reading this.

If you look in the head section of your mark-up it should look something like this:

<title>Auto Trader UK - Used cars for sale</title>

Title tag - What it does:

Google SERP snippet:
Bing SERP snippet




In this example we can see how much prominence the search engines place on this tag. Both search engines have made the text bold and highlighted in both examples. This behaviour is replicated in almost all search engines, yandex, yahoo, and baidu. It also powers the tab name in most browsers and social media. haring buttons tend to make it the link text, so it is oobba oobba important.

This tag will generally be the first thing that a potential customer will see of your site. The job of the title tag is to entice people to read the meta description (next blog post) hopefully making them click on your non paid link. In the hierarchy of tags this tag is considered as the most important within a pages mark-up, within the search engine algorithm.

Title Tag – What to remember:

  1. Must be unique
  2. Should contain a primary keyword
  3. Ideally no more than 70 characters
  4. Most important keywords to left of tag.

Title Tag – How to optimise.


The title tag should never-never-never be keyword stuffed, stuffing your title tag is a great way to tell Google that you have a poor quality site. Please don’t go there! 
Your title tag is essentially a call to action. It's goal is to take someone from the search engine result page to the on domain page. I always take data from advert testing on my paid adverts and apply it to my site title tags. Your title tag doesn’t have to render on page.

It is important to understand the user journey through the buying funnel.  By understanding the stage of the buying funnel we can optimise the messaging to that user.  A researcher is not going to react so well to sales promotions for example.

1) The homepage title tag

Example. - www.parrot-emporium.com

Tag considerations:

1.What keywords will this page been seen for in the SERPS?
brand search – “parrot emporium”, “the parrot emporium” etc
local search - “parrot shops in location” “parrot shops near location” – or mobile search
short term queries – “Parrot supplies”etc.

2.What is the user likly to be trying to achieve based on keyword usage?

There are going to be a range of requirements, from returning visitors just checking the title tag to ensure they are returning to the correct site, to sort tail research traffic looking for generic information about parrots.

3. Type of user?

Either at the very beginning (research traffic) or the very end (brand searchers) returning to your site to make purchases.
Example of title tag

Bird and Parrot Supplies- The Parrot Emporium UK – 24 Hour Delivery
<primary keywords> - <domain> - <offer>

2) Listing Page Tag – eg www.parrot-emporium.com/organic -bird-seed

1.What keywords will this page been seen for in the SERPS?

- Product search – “organic bird seed” , “organic bird food”, “organic parrot seed”

2.What is the user likly to be trying to achieve based on keyword usage?

Looking most likely to compare different types, prices of “organic bird seed”

3. Type of user?
 
They are mid-level researchers. They have a product they are looking to buy “bird seed” and have qualified this search with one requirement “organic”. They might not be purchasers just yet as they have not decided on a brand eg “harisons organic bird food” or a pricing requirement “cheap organic bird food” They are still researching but are more qualified than the previous user searching for “parrot supplies”.
Organic Bird Seed- The Parrot Emporium UK – Buy one get one free.

<primary keywords> - <domain> - <offer>

This should give you an idea of how to formulate your title tags for your entire site. Remember every title must be unique and that includes any database generated pages! Title tags can be changed and their content should be tested in PPC adverts.

Advanced Title tag Usage

Bit of advice for the SEO ninja! Using title tags to ensure that paginated pages don’t out rank the master list page.

Using the same example of a list page: www.parrot-emporium.com/organic-bird-seed

On this example page there are 500 types of organic bird seed types, due to template design the maximum number of product on a this example list template is 50. This means the CMS is going to create 10 list pages for “organic bird seed”. – It is important that all of these pages are indexable as we want to pass page rank to the product pages. (I will write a blog on how to handle page pagnation but another day.)

Example:

Page 1 title tag: Organic Bird Seed- The Parrot Emporium UK – Buy one get one free.
Page 2 title tag: Pg 2 of 10 – Organic Bird Seed- The Parrot Emporium UK

We have devalued the title tag slightly by pushing the main keyword “organic bird seed” away from the first keyword in the tag. If both pages are otherwise the same the Pg 2 should now not outrank the main paginated page. There is a bit more to a full paginate page stratergy than this but I will write a full blog on SEO vs Paginated pages soon.

ps.  www.parrot-emporium.co.uk doesnt exist....

Written by Martin McAndrew

Twitter: @MartinMcAndrew


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