I ran my company’s site through Google Webmaster Tools the other day, and it returned some interesting results. Google currently has 291 of the site’s pages indexed, which is more than I expected. I hope to increase that number soon, because there are some sections of the site which are not represented at all, but that’s another topic. The really appalling thing I learned is that 149 of those 291 pages (>50%) have the same page title. Not good! As we all know, good page titles are one of the most powerful SEO elements in existence (if not the most powerful), so one of my immediate projects is updating the page titles sitewide.
It’s been a couple of years since I did this, so I went looking for some updated guidelines. SEOmoz has some excellent best practices for page titles, and even though they were posted a year and a half ago, I think most of them are still valid.
The first thing I’m doing is creating a central repository of page titles and URLs so I don’t have to keep looking them up. I was delighted to find that I can export a list of titles and URLs from Google Webmaster Tools, but it’s less than helpful because it concatenates all URLs with the same title into the same cell in Excel. The Content by Title report in Google Analytics isn’t much better, but it does seem a little more complete.
Next up, defining a structure around page titles, so that both now and in the future, determining the page title will be quick and dirty. Considerations for this structure include:
- Keyword order. Brand first? Brand last? A little of each, on different parts of the site? I’m of two minds about this. For usability, I don’t like brand-last titles, because when I bookmark the page, I want to have the name first. It also seems more intuitive and consistent to keep it in standard breadcrumb-trail format. In terms of SEO though, it’s important to have keywords up front, within the first few words if possible. It’s also important not to use the same keyword at or near the start of every page title, so there’s another vote for brand-last titles.
- Text separators. Arrows, hyphens, colons, pipes, tildas, slashes? IMO, hyphens are boring and colons are overdone. While arrows are good visually, they may also pose a problem with usability. I think I will use pipes, because they will look familiar to my target audience (primarily programmers and developers).
- Character limit. Google truncates display of anything over 60-70 characters with ellipses, but does use the rest in evaluating relevance — and may even include it in the index. And it’s not all Google, all the time – Yahoo will display well over 100 characters most of the time. I like the concept of keeping the titles short and concise, but I don’t want to limit myself if it’s not really necessary.
- Do-overs. Is it worth revising all the page titles now, if we’re beginning a complete site redesign next month? Ordinarily I’d say probably not, but I suspect a lot of the content will remain the same. In addition, it just freakin’ annoys me to have the site sitting out there with all those duplicate title tags.
- Content. How to make the title tags compelling and unique without copying them verbatim from the content? How to include a strong call to action without being spammy? I have the feeling I’ll be making good use of my Thesaurus.
Ultimately (as with everything I do in SEO), my goal is to strike a balance between what is helpful and appealing for real live users to read, and what works in the search engines. While ideally I’d focus only on being user-friendly, that won’t help a bit if users can’t find the site.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Do you find it best, from an seo perspective, to repeat words in the title some of the time or not at all? Something I’ve been thinking about – for example if your 3 top target phrases are Tennis Shoes, Red Shoes, and Brown Shoe Sale – Would you craft a title with all three phrases in correct order (thus repeating the word shoe a few times)
What do you think? Do you know anyone who is real good with titles?
Thanks,
Eric
I think it depends on the page. If you sell tennis shoes, red shoes, and brown shoes all on the same page, then there’s no reason not to include them all in the title. However, if you use an all-inclusive title on a page that’s strictly about red shoes, you run the risk of being spammy and irrelevant.
The key, for me, is relevance. Think about what a real person would see when looking at the page title compared with the content on the page. Usually, what’s good for users is good for the search engines.