Page titles. Man they are IMPORTANT. As the SEO landscape continues to change on a day to day basis, page titles are the one aspect that NOBODY can doubt are important. Meta keywords got shot down a long time ago and some SEO experts are now questioning the importance of meta descriptions, but meta titles are still the foundation of everything that’s important about your on site SEO.
Page Title Creation Process
Firstly, setting aside the actual time to work on your meta titles is extremely important. Obviously it depends on the size of your site, but generally this isn’t a job that’s going to take a couple of hours, it’s an entire process from start to finish that can take days to get right. But once it’s done, you have a great structure to efficiently build upon.
The process of creating page titles should look something like the following:
- Undertake keyword research for each landing page;
- Undertake competitor analysis for each landing page;
- Consider the most relevant key terms to that page;
- Use a snippet tool such as SEO Mofo’s rich snippet tool to assess just how your titles are going to look and make the most of the character spaces available;
- Ensure you there is no duplicity in key terms across your page titles.
Further to this, if you have a blog, you will need to ensure that unique, well considered page titles are used for each blog post.
Importance Of Page Titles
Page titles are still very important to Google and SEO. So much so that if they feel you haven’t accurately described a page or if they think they can do a better job of it, they might select a section of your page copy, or take copy from a DMoz or Yahoo directory listing to rewrite your page titles for you. Google ARE watching. In fact, try a generic search query for something like ‘laptops’ or ‘televisions’ and I’m sure you’ll find that almost all of the top 20 results feature the keyword in their page title.
Keeping Page Titles Fresh
For best practice search engine optimisation your page titles should be updated according to the updates of your copy or as and when you undertake keyword research. At this stage, you may consider using a tool such as Screaming Frog or Xenu link sleuth to gain an overview of your page titles and eradicate any duplicity. It’s also important to avoid long page titles and try and keep them around 70 characters long. This will also need to be monitored if you have an e-commerce stores and are using a dynamic page title creation rule.
Scott is a writer who would suggest analysing your page titles on any sized website at least every 6 weeks.
About the Author
