Page Title Optimization
A free guide to the basics of optimizing your website’s page titles.
Developing a well optimized page title is typically among the first steps in optimizing a page. The page title establishes the page’s overall relevancy for the search engine spiders.
The content of the page title is also important for getting click-through from the results page, since the page title is generally displayed as the search results link.
Optimizing Page Titles
Page title technical details
Placement
The page title tag should reside with other meta tags in the <HEAD></HEAD> of a document
Format
<TITLE>Your title goes here</TITLE>
Limitations
Maximum character limit – 85 characters max
[ we recommend you stick with 40-60 ]
Page title optimization tips
- Limit the phrases targeted in a page title to 2-3 closely related phrases (max)
- Limit your page title length – 85 characters max, we recommend you stick to around 40-60 characters
- Limit page title to targeted phrases, avoid irrelevant words (ie phone number, url, branding, tagline)
- Include phrases relevant to your page’s content, avoid phrases the content doesn’t support
- Include the exact target phrase toward the front of the page title
- Use simple characters to separate phrases (coma , ,colon : , hyphen - , pipe | )
- Avoid using special characters if possible (registration marks, copyright symbols etc)
- Avoid repeating a phrase back-to-back (ie “Free SEO Guide | SEO guide”)
Optimized page title examples
Assuming the target phrase is “Free SEO Guide” here are a few examples of page titles with varying qualities of optimization.
Poor Page Title:
“—–<<<< www.SaverSites.com >>>>—–”
“Welcome to SaverSites.com”
Better Page Title:
“Welcome to the Free SEO Guide section”
“This is a Free SEO Guide | SaverSites.com”
Best Page Title:
“Free SEO Guide”
“Free SEO Guide | Free Online SEO Guide”