Title Tags: A badly written title will sink your site

[indianboy]

A title tag is very important for nailing your web site to the top of the serps. Yet so many folks are unsure of how to construct a proper title.
I don't claim to have a lock on Title Composition, but I do have my views. Feel free to criticize or take it apart, if you wish.

The first 7-9 words of a title tag are the most important. Many folks, however, put their company name as the first part of the title tag. What a waste. It's like sending your son off to school with no shoes and no books.

The second area to look at is the syntax. I have noticed that Google likes titles that have a grammatical structure.

The serps, when influenced by the Title Tag, seem to avoid the List Title. The "List Title" is the one that is a list of keywords: Widget Mania! Widgets, blue widgets, green widgets, widgets with...


If you study the Title Tag Influenced serps (serps that are influenced by the title tag), you will notice that they are structured as sentences. Find the right widget here, whether it's blue or white. WidgetMania!


There's also the Partial Seeding strategy, where you throw in two parts of your keyword phrase in the title, then drill the third part in the body text.

If you have enough web pages, you can mix and match these strategies. For instance, the Hard Optimization:
Widget Keyword Phrase can be found at Widget Mania


Soft Optimization:
Keyword is the place for Widget Mania keyword phrase.


And the partial seeding (as noted above).

The title tag isn't the end all be all for getting you to the top of the serp, but a properly written title can make the difference.

[indianboy]

sometimes a short company name can help for branding purposes. For example:

WidgetWorld – Professional blue widget services
WidgetWorld – Affordable red widget tools

When people conduct multiple searches they well begin to see WidgetWorld everywhere and maybe begin to think that WidgetWorld may be the way to go. It is all about striking the ideal balance because I agree that taking out WidgetWorld in the title would be better from a purely SEO perspective.

[indianboy]

Let's not forget the idea that the Title tag not only serves an SEO function, but also serves a selling function.
Your title needs to be keyword rich and search engine friendly in order to pull those top rankings, but it also has to be intriguing enough to entice searchers to click on it. I view the Title tag as a site's first chance at conversion.

That said, I tend to go with slightly longer titles, in other words, my Titles are rarely JUST the keyword phrase that the page is optimized for. I'm on the side of

"Purchase Discounted Red Widgets"

rather than

"Discounted Red Widgets"

It depends on the phrase, the purpose of the site, the context of the page, etc... Sometimes, depending on the page and the engine, your description will work well enough to convert the searcher to a purchaser, but other times, you'll need to rely on your Title tag to do this. So, I tend to pay equal amounts of attention to the marketing AND SEO purposes of a title tag.