Sometimes, in life, we find that there are small hinges that can swing big doors. Although typically not the case, when we find them, it’s advantageous to capitalize on them. When it comes to title tags, this couldn’t be more true .
Properly optimizing title tags has a direct correlation with bringing in more sales leads from your website.
Search engine optimization is one of those things that can be elusive. Google, with the highest market share, doesn’t reveal all that it takes for a business to rank high. However, they do reveal a couple of tactics necessary for ranking high, and optimizing a website’s title tags is high on the list — second to creating fresh content on a regular basis. If you’re not sure what a title tag is, below is an image from a Pg. 1 Google search result for the term “ocean freight”.
The title tag portion in the image is “Ocean Freight | CEVA Logistics”:
From the title tag above, Google can clearly see that this is in fact CEVA Logistics’ ocean freight page, and since it’s very important to Google to provide the proper search engine results to its users, it has given CEVA the Pg. 1 ranking result for this term.
Note that this title tag not only gives information about what the page content is about, but also includes a highly searched keyword term that will improve the business’ ranking in search engine result pages.
Now, while the example above is the way that it should be done for all internal pages on a website, when it comes to a website’s home page , there is an exception.
On the home page of a website, Google wants to see the name of the business listed first. Then, a description of what the company does should come next. Keep in mind that Google truncates page titles at 60 characters, so you want to keep it under that.
Here’s a good home page example from a company called Air Freight:
In the page title above, you can clearly see what the business name is, followed by what they do, and likely what they want to rank for in search engine results. They even had enough space to fit in their contact number so that interested parties can easily get in touch.
Rewards for Proper Labeling
Google counts on you, the business owner, to properly label your website so that it can index it properly in search results. And when a website is properly labeled, the business is rewarded with higher search engine rankings. It’s an opportunity that’s open and available to all businesses — large and small — regardless of marketing budget.
Title tags have been one of the cornerstones of SEO since the beginning. As far as we can tell, this isn’t going to change.
Beyond Title Tags — How to Gain High Search Engine Rankings
Yes, title tags are very important. Essential to outrank your competition. But beyond title tags, if you’re trying to rank high, you must have content that speaks to the keywords that you’re going after. Content, in the form of blog posts, or regular website pages, is essential. Rule of thumb is that there must be approximately eight blog posts of a reasonable length (600 words or more) for each keyword that you’d like to rank for. And sometimes even more content is needed for terms that are more difficult to rank for. There are countless stats on the benefits of blogging for business, some of which can be found in this article, which talks about how to effectively blog to attract a greater amount of sales leads.
