Most “SEO Experts” will try to convince you that only they have the magic mojo to make your website a high-traffic success, which is why they’re entitled to gobs of your hard-earned cash. Unfortunately a lot of what these consultants do amounts to little more than digital trickery—payed links, keyword gaming, micro-sites setup for the sole purpose of linking to your site, and other shenanigans that hurt everyone’s online experience by filling the web with links to things in which users are seldom interested.
Thankfully, search engines have gotten a lot better in recent years so that the mojo peddled by these modern-day snake oil salesman no longer works, or at least is much less effective. So, instead of hiring some dude who has his photo slathered all over his website that is otherwise brimming with generic clip art and bold red letters, you can just follow a few simple best practices that will help people who are actually interested in your content to find it.
The easiest way to start optimizing your set for better search results is to start considering the titles of individual pages. This is a far cry from the tricks and tips the self-proclaimed “gurus” might provide, but it really works. In fact, seomoz.org, one of the leading blogs dedicated to the topic of SEO, ranked title tags among the top 5 factors for determining search engine rankings in a survey of SEO professionals.
Of course, perhaps this isn’t the best evidence to present after dismissing the opinions of anyone proclaiming to be an expert on SEO. So let’s go straight to the source and see what the folks at the Google Webmaster Blog have to say about page titles. In a post from October 2006 entitled “Target visitors or search engines?” Google’s true gurus say:
Whenever possible, ensure each page has a unique title that describes the page well. For instance, if your site is for your store “Buffy’s House of Sofas”, a visitor may want to bookmark your home page and the order page for your red, fluffy sofa. If all of your pages have the same title: “Wecome to my site!”, then a visitor will have trouble finding your site again in the bookmarks. However, if your home page has the title “Buffy’s House of Sofas” and your red sofa page has the title “Buffy’s red fluffy sofa”, then visitors can glance at the title to see what it’s about and can easily find it in the bookmarks later. And if your visitors are anything like me, they may have several browser tabs open and appreciate descriptive titles for easier navigation.
This simple tip for visitors helps search engines too. Search engines index pages based on the words contained in them, and including descriptive titles helps search engines know what the pages are about. And search engines often use a page’s title in the search results. “Welcome to my site” may not entice searchers to click on your site in the results quite so much as “Buffy’s House of Sofas”.
So what does that all mean? To put it a bit more simply, titles matter because human beings read them and will click on them if they’re short, descriptive, and comprehensible. They also matter because search engines read them and use them as a means to determine what sort of content a web page contains. This all boils down to some simple rules for titles. Make sure all of your page titles:
- Accurately describe the content of the page
- Contain the important keywords from the page—use “Obama” instead of “The President” or “Google” instead of “Popular Search Engine”
- Are completely unique—don’t have a series of posts all named “Daily Links”
- Are 70 characters max
This post is the first of an ongoing series on SEO best practices. As more posts are added to the series they will appear both on this post’s page and at http://readymadeweb.com/series/seo-best-practices.
Cord is the director of new media at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He has been a web developer for over a decade, working with non-profits to rein in their web development costs and grow their online audiences through simple best practices.
