What is a title? Take a look at the top of your browser. It should say ‘Interactive Strategies by USWeb – Microsoft Internet Explorer’. This is the first thing search engines read when they come to your Website.

To see a real demonstration on the power of titles, let’s take a look at some of the most competitive search terms in Google and see what the top ranking sites have

Search Term: Mortgage

Website: www.mortgage101.com

Title: Mortgage 101.com Answers to your Mortgage questions

Search Term: Viagra

Website: www.viagra.com

Title: Viagra

Search Term: Online Marketing

Website: www.usweb.com

Title: USWeb: Online Marketing Firm – Internet Marketing – Interactive Agency

As you can see, the search term is almost always in the title when a site ranks for a competitive term. Try searching for yourself on terms that matter to your business and see the titles that come up for the top rankings.

When we bring up titles to our clients, we are often hit with the same questions. Let me cover a few here now:

Question 1: How many characters should the title be?

Answer: You will get conflicting answers on this depending on who you ask. The best answer is, make them less than 70 characters. If you’re going for a really competitive term, you should try to keep from diluting the title with a lot of other words. Keep your titles short, and make sure your term is in them.

Question 2: Should the main keyword I’m going for be first?

Answer: Once again, conflicting answers from different people. I like to put the keyword in second position and put the company name upfront when possible. I think it makes a better branding impression and will increase the click through rate. Some people would argue and say the high up the term, the better the search result.

Question 3: Can I go for multiple search terms in the title?

Answer: If you like at the above example for USWeb, you’ll notice we went for a few search terms. Not only does USWeb rank for ‘Online Marketing’, but we also rank for ‘online marketing firm’, ‘internet marketing firm’, ‘interactive marketing firm’, and ‘interactive agency’. We did not succeed yet in ranking for ‘internet marketing’. The word is too competitive and our title is too diluted with terms to rank. But…we are working on this in other ways to be covered later.

Questions 4: Should my company name be in the title?

Answer: As I mentioned above, I really like to put the company name in the title first. I think it makes for a cleaner looking title. That being said, you should make sure that you at least rank for your company name before making this decision. Obviously if a prospect looks for your company in a search engine and does not find your site, you have hurt your brand. I would strongly urge you to use your company name in your page titles.

Please feel free to follow up with questions you have on titles, or submit in a title your considering and we can look it over and let you know what we think.

One last thing to really think about with titles; if you have a Website with 200 pages, you should have a Website with 200 different titles. Every page of your site should have a unique title. When we took on Forbes.Com as a client, their title for almost every page was simply, Forbes.Com. With over 300,000 articles on their site, they only had several different page titles. Now when you go to Forbes.Com and scroll through their site you will notice almost every page has a unique title. Their articles simply use the title of the articles as the page title. This made a significant difference in their search traffic.

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