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How To: Page Titles

If you are a search engine optimization beginner, a great place to start is with your site’s page titles.

Page titles are very important to aiding a better ranking from Google, Yahoo or MSN. So let's break down a page title and what you can do with it.

What is a page title and where is it?

The page title is the summary of what your web page is about. There is one for every page of your website located in your code, near the top.

Each page title should summarize that page’s content with your strongest keywords. If you use a content management solution, it should have access to the page properties to complete this information for each page. If you work with a web company, make sure completing the page titles and meta data is part of their service.

Why is the page title so important?

The page title has two jobs in today's world of search. First, it is the summary of the page's content. The engines take this summary and use it categorize your webpage. They will only pay attention to so many characters in your page title so you need to be brief and truly target what that page is about. Filling your page title with 30 key words will do you no good. A good rule of thumb is to have 4 to 8 words, or under 65 characters including spaces. 

What should you consider when writing page titles?

1. Your page title should summarize the pages content
2. It should contain your most important key words for ranking
3. The main area, location or city you want to target. 
4. Most important words to the left.
5. Be brief, you only have 4 to 8 words or 65 characters.
6. Make sure it reads well and makes sense to a search engine user
7. Mix in your company name whenever possible, its good branding.
8. Lose marketing words like “greatest, trusted, perfect”. 
9. Use dividers like pipes (|) or dashes (–) where needed to separate information without using too many characters.
10. Most important – Write a unique and relevant page title for EACH page on your website!

Here are some additional valuable posts on website page titles:

• Page Title Best Practices from SEOmoz
• Webtacs Video on Page Titles