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)