SEO Title Tag Best Practice

What Is The Best Title Tag For Google SEO?

This is just my preference, backed up with observations I’ve made over the last few years I’ve learned / practiced seo. This is the stuff people ask me on a daily basis at my seo company – What Is The Best Title Tag For Google?

<title>What Is The Best Title Tag For Google?</title>

Title Tag Best Practices

For me, a perfect title tag in Google is;

• Highly relevant to the page it refers to, the page title is often used by Google as the title of a link in search engine results pages.
• The “crown” of a keyword targeted article with important keyword featuring AT LEAST ONCE.
• Probably 5-12 words, but ideally under the 70 characters limit (character counter), so the full title appears in Google SERPS (search engine results pages) but it depends on the page content. I usually like to keep to 8 words, but I do mix this up a little. I have had success with longer titles…. much longer titles. Google will INDEX perhaps 1000s of characters in a title… but know one knows exactly how many characters Google will actually count as a TITLE. It is a very hard thing to try to isolate accurately.
• Some pages do well with a call to action – one which reflects exactly a searcher’s intent (e.g. to learn something, or buy something, or hire something. Remember this is your hook in search engines, and there is a lot of competing pages out there!
• The perfect title tag on a page is unique to other pages on the site.
• I like to make sure my keywords feature as early as possible in a title tag but the important thing is to have important keywords in your title tag SOMEWHERE!
• For me, when SEO is more important than branding, the company name goes at the end of the tag, and I use a variety of dividers to separate as no one way performs best.
• I like to think I write titles for search engines and humans.
• Know that Google tweaks everything regularly – why not what the perfect title keys off? So MIX it up…
• Don’t obsess! Natural is probably better, and will only get better as engines evolve.
• Generally speaking, the more domain trust/authority your SITE has in Google, the easier it is for a new page to rank for something. So bear that in mind.
• Also bear in mind, in 2011, the html title element you choose for your page, might not be what Google chooses to include in your SERP snippet. The search snippet is very much QUERY dependant these days – which Google choosing what it thinks is the most relevant title for your search snippet, and it can use information from your page or in links to that page to create a very different SERP snippet title. For example, your home page title might be different than your title tag, but so also might your internal pages title tags be different in Google.

Note;

When you write a page title, you have a chance right at the beginning of the page to tell Google if this is a spam site or a quality site – such as – have you repeated the keyword 4 times or only once? I think title tags, like everything else, should probably be as simple as possible too, with the keyword once and perhaps a related term if possible.

I think its fair to surmise Google might treat title tags (actually, ‘title elements’) on more authoritative domains differently than on new sites, too, that is, as with other things, more trusted domains might get away with more spammy titles, but from a user point of view and with searcher intent (and Google’s commitment to this) at the forefront, I’d try to keep things as simple and looking as human-generated and unique as possible.

I’m certainly cleaning up the way I write my titles all the time. How do you do it?

Written by Shaun Anderson