When publishing content on the web, it’s always important to optimize page titles for the best SEO Goodness. Most people don’t really think much about the title and just sort of throw it together, but your title is a very important aspect of SEO and that’s not going to change.
Just last month, I was reminded of the power simple adjustments to Title Tags can make in the rankings of a blog.
For a year I’d been battling many other sites for page one placement of a pretty general keyword and was frustrated that I wasn’t making it to page one. The site had a PageRank of 4, thousands of backlinks and hundreds of pages of content but could not get past page 2.
Then something strange started happening. Certain blog posts from the site would appear on page one, but not the homepage of the site. I kept wracking my brain.
What the heck is wrong with my homepage that Google won’t list it in the SERPs?
And one day it hit me like a ton of bricks.
The keyword I was targeting WAS NOT even in the Title Tag of the homepage! How could I expect to rank for something that wasn’t even there? Those stray blog posts appeared on page one simply because that keyword was in the title!
So, quickly I updated the homepage Title Tag and a couple days later, sure enough, the results had updated and there was my homepage, right where it belonged – on page one of the search results for that specific keyword.
Never underestimate the power of proper use of Title Tags. It can even slip by SEO’s sometimes!
So, when writing your great content, think long and hard about your page title. Make sure it appeals to random readers but also make sure it’s keyword optimized for search bots.
Nice one, Jonathan! No matter how fancy everything gets, the basics need to be covered. Thanks for the reminder!
Good thing to remember, especially in the development of some of our other sites. Title tags can also fall to the wayside when communicating to your writers. I recently came across a situation where certain writers did not understand the purpose of the title tags and were therefore just repeating the tags they had posted for previous articles. Not the most effect method of gaining results through SEO.