SEO Tips for the Title Tag

The title tag is one of the meta elements contained in the <head></head> portion of your page code. Unsurprisingly, the title tag is used as the title of the page. As such it will appear as the page title in search engine results, on the browser, and in bookmarks. Since the title tag appears so many places it is important that they are written primarily for your visitors.

<title>Title goes between opening and closing tags</title>

An optimized title tag will follow these three simple guidelines …

Title tag should be unique, readable to humans, and accurately describe the page’s content.
Title tag should include your primary keyword phrase that the page is being optimized for
Title tag should be 64 characters or less to work best in all search engines.

A lot has been written about the optimal way to do titles in order to squeeze the most SEO juice out of them. Personally I feel that if you just follow those three simple guidelines you will be getting 99% out of the tag. If you want to go out and try and get that last 1% here are a few more suggestions that may help.

Place your keyword phrase as early in the title as possible
Place your site/company name at the end since you already rank well for that (hopefully)
Experiment with special characters in the title. It won’t help SEO but may make your site more noticeable in search results.

That’s pretty much it for the title tag. Despite its importance it is a very simple tag to get right. Just remember the 3 simple guidelines and keep the title readable for your users.