Gabriel Machuret | SEO consultant

Incorporating the below-mentioned changes to your title tag can greatly help boost your rankings and increase targeted traffic towards your website.

1.Include keyword phrases and keywords in your title tag – a search engine will see the title on each of the web page and will determine how relevant it is to the search query.

If for example you search for “HI-Fi”, most probably some of the results that you’ll get will have “Hi-Fi” in the title. For you to be able to be searched and found through the search engines, you have to optimize your site for a particular set of keyword phrases, which have to be included in your title tag. Keep in mind though that you’ll not be constrained to add only a single keyword phrase to your title, you can even add 2 or 3 as long as you’ll not make the title very long. Of equal importance to keep in mind is that it should be easily understandable and comprehensive for a human being.

2.Order the keyword phrases effectively – Putting an important keyword phrase at the beginning of the title tag will make it be seen easily by the search engines. For example:
Johny Electrical – HI-Fi Systems
Hi-Fi Systems – Johny Electrical

While both examples are acceptable and comprehensible to the human eye, the search engine eye will find the second example more relevant in the event “Hi-Fi” is searched since it appears at the beginning of the title. In general, it’s advisable to put the company name or the website name at the end of the title tag.

3.Make a visually enticing title – While this point may not be much appealing to the search engines, it would be appealing to the web users who will in turn click on it in the results page.
4.Have as unique Title Tags as Possible – Just like each page on your website has to be unique, your title tags too have to be very unique. In addition to a unique title tag making a website descriptive and easy to navigate through, it will help the search engines respond to search queries more accurately and give room for deeper penetration to your website’s pages in the database.

Common title tags mistakes:

1.Blank Title Tags

2.Using default or “Untitled” text in the title tag – in case you use a web page editing application, it’s likely to put default text in the title tag. Its upon you to ensure that it doesn’t happen

3.Writing title tags irrelevant to web content – to rate the relevancy of a website, the search engines will compare the text found in the title tag against that found in the page content. If the two aren’t related, it will substantially reduce your ranking. On the other hand, it would be annoying to a potential client who visits your page when in the real sense the title tag that led them to that page does not relate to the page content.

4.Stuffing the title tag by repeating the keyword phrases – search engines may see this as spamming leading to your site getting penalized by de-ranking it.

In summary, disregarding title tags is a huge mistake if you want to get high rankings. Even though it takes a lot more than the simple title tag to elevate you to the top of the search engines, title tags on their own can be very effective in guaranteeing a search engine that your website’s content is more relevant compared to that of your competitor.