Pet peeve of mine here, so many people who should know much better call the title element the title tag. It’s so bad I’ve had to title this post Title Tag instead of title Element (as it should be). Please it is NOT a tag, it’s an element so SEO Consultants out there stop calling it a blinking title tag!
Now that I’ve got that off my chest 
The contents of your title element is probably the most important on page SEO factor there is, so lets get it right.
Treat every page of your site as an island, if a page is about a mortgage calculator then the perfect SEO title for the Mortgage Calculator SERP is very simple it’s
Mortgage Calculator
If on another page of the same site is about UK Mortgage Brokers the perfect SEO title is
UK Mortgage Brokers
It really is that simple to determine a perfect SEO title when a page is targeting one main SERP (if there’s multiple SERPs, little more difficult, but same idea).
What you should avoid are titles like:
Name Of Site : UK Mortgage Brokers
www.urlofsite.com : UK Mortgage Brokers
Name Of Site Page 1
www.urlofsite.com Page 1
How I Spent My Monday Afternoon
Or a derivative of the above-
Name Of Site : How I Spent My Monday Afternoon – Name Of Site
Or worse of all the titles
Nothing whatsoever, no title element!!
The above titles waste valuable title tag real estate. The title is so important, so don’t waste it on pointless words that add nothing to your pages SEO or to a potential visitor clicking your link on a Google search result.
This doesn’t mean you can’t add an extra word or three for sales reasons or to aim for some secondary SERPs, after all you want people to click on your pages in a Google SERP, if your page is about Cars the best title would be
Cars
From an SEO perspective, but from a click thru/sales point of view that doesn’t tell a perspective visitor what they are going to get. So you might need to qualify your keywords-
Cheap Cars
Cars for Women
Safe Cars
That said you’ll find most times when you do this you should have been more realistic in your keyword choice in the first place. So you want the Cars SERP, but realistically your site isn’t going to be in the top 10 for that really hard SERP, so aim for easier SERPs to start with (like the ones above).
If you ever get a site so popular it might compete for these super tough search phrases then you could try aiming higher. But most of us are going to have to settle for the easier SERPs.
Don’t worry though, I’ve found you can get far more traffic from the easy SERPs than the really hard SERPs (SEO long tail) and for far less SEO effort.
Also see title optimization from this SEO Tutorial for more examples of SEO title optimization.
David Law (SEO Consultant)
Website - WordPress SEO
7 responses to Title Tag Optimization
Meta Title Tag, Meta Keywords Tag, Meta Description Tag
Amongst the three major Meta tags (Meta Title Tag, Meta Keywords Tag, Meta Description Tag) the Title Tag is one which is given the most weight by search engines’ algorithms. In fact, this tag should be written so that it should give the idea about your site instantly. A perfect written Title tag can generate quick and appreciable traffic to your site. The text written in this tag appears as clickable text in the search engine result page (SERP) and if it is really meaningful and conveys most about the web page, more clickthroughs will be the result.
-Harrold Brown
Title Tag Optimization
Yes you are right. choosing a right title tag can have a good effect on SE rankings. It should be matched with your content of the webpage and its a good idea to use an unique title for every webpage of your site.
Good to see the commenters above read the post above, NOT!!
They still called it the title tag and not the title element as it should be called.
Also the title element isn’t a meta tag at all.
It shows how poorly trained/educated the vast majority of SEO consultants are!
David Law
Reposting because my tags don’t appear.
If you want to be very precise the tag is that thing with angled brackets, e.g. <title>. The element includes both tags (unless it is self-closing) and the content, if any, within the tags.
Title tag: <title>
Title element: <title>This is a title element</title>
I just want to suggest you one more point, if we target 3 – 4 keywords for 1 webpage then title element should be according to that.
e.g.:- I’m targeting 3 keywords cars, best cars, woman cars
Then consider above situation while preparing title element for your webpage.
keyword prominence is also important factor while writing title element for the web page.
Thank you for post.
I just want to suggest you one more point, if we target 3 – 4 keywords for 1 webpage then title element should be according to that.
e.g.:- I’m targeting 3 keywords cars, best cars, woman cars
Then consider above situation while preparing title element for your webpage.
keyword prominence is also important factor while writing title element for the web page.
Thank you for post.
Ok, I have one quick question when dealing with a paginated record set. How would you handle say you are selling Christmas Widgets and you have 8 pages of the widgets. Would the best title be “Christmas Widgets” for each of the pages or as I have done currently “Christmas Widgets (page 1 or 8)”. My past experience with Google and Bing was that pages 2-8 were not getting indexed because of identical titles on each of the pages. As soon as I added the pagination everything started showing up.
Thanks, John
Title Tag Optimization
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