[This is a guest post by Philip Golobish. Philip Golobish is a professional SEO consultant for Slingshot SEO, an Indianapolis, Indiana. When he’s not sweet talking Googlebot, Phil can be found headbanging at the local music show.]
According to a 2009 SEOmoz poll of SEO professionals, “keyword use anywhere in the title tag,” is one of the top five most influential ranking factors on a search engine’s results page. The reason it’s important is pretty simple: usability. For example, say you maintain a heavy metal music blog named “Axes and Anvils” and the site’s name is all you include in your title tag. With only the site’s brand name to work from, search engines and searchers can’t easily identify what your site is about when they see it on a results page (for all they know, your site sells wood cutting tools and iron working implements). However, by simply adding the keyword phrase, “heavy metal music blog,” to your title tag, search engines and their users are immediately given a better idea of what your site is actually about; thereby, making everyone happy. Check out some “heavy metal” title tag examples below.
Recommended format:
Keyword or Phrase < Category | Website Title
A basic example:
Heavy Metal Music Blog | Axes & Anvils
An example looking to receive some traffic from people searching for band names:
Heavy Metal Music Blog |Metallica to Slayer |Axes & Anvils
An example targeting a location:
Heavy Metal Music Blog | Cleveland, Ohio | Axes & Anvils
For the examples above, search engines will now associate the blog “Axes & Anvils” with all the keyword combinations that are included in its title tag; e.g., “heavy metal,” “metal blog,” “metal music blog,” etc.
Neat, huh?
Googlebot is a sucker for sweet talk and he loves having keywords whispered in his ear. With that in mind, the next time he stops by to index your site, greet him with something sweet by adding some of your site’s keywords to your “title tag.”
For more information about “title tag” strategies, check out this classic post entitled, “Best Practices for Title Tags,” by Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.
Are you a WordPress user looking for a quick and easy way to add “title tags” to your blog? If so, check out this plugin called, SEO Title Tag.
Thank you Philip for contributing. I know I did not have this topic up and had only starting writing my own posts. I usually like to break things up into separate sections..and you did well with this. I actually have this here at Blondish.net and at my other site too. However, my past themes did not because I was still learning SEO.
Full of information and neatly written short and sharp article. Thank you Phillip for this fresh taste.
I have read that you need to think what people might type in search box when they are looking for information in your post and compose your title accordingly. I think this is good way to make title more search engine friendly but many times I find it hard to Title my posts.
My recent post The Second Step of Blogging – How to promote?
Learned something new. Most of the time I used the title tag for the search engine to promote my website, but I think have a standard like category and web page title is a good way of doing it.