It is not a myth that having good page titles and meta descriptions will not only help search engines understand what your page is about, above all they will help convince the reader of a results page to visit your website.
Below we summarize 3 things you can do (and 3 things you can’t) when writing your titles for your blog or website.
To do?
- Be specific
Each page on your site should have a specific purpose. Think about the page in front of you and try to describe it. If you use “and” to combine multiple thoughts on this page, it’s a good time to start creating new pages. When writing titles for each of these pages, keep the details of the page in mind. If it’s a page about “toasters,” the title should include keywords focused on “toasters,” and not a phrase with more generic keywords like “kitchen gadgets.” Or like this example of how to create an email marketing campaign.
- Be unique
Just like each page title should be specific to each page, you should also ensure that each page title is unique across your site. If you’re following the first rule and have made sure that all pages focus precisely on a single topic, it should be extremely easy to also make sure that each page title is unique.
- If i were
When you’re viewing a SERP (search engine results page), there are only three things that appear: the page title, the page description (bonus points if you have a specifically targeted meta description), and the URL of your page. page. Try to treat page titles like the titles of your blog posts and make them useful and interesting.
In this video you can find tips for choosing a good title for your posts:
What to avoid?
- The repetitions
Page titles should not include multiple variations of the same phrase. A great example of what not to do would be “toaster, toaster oven, kitchen toaster, college toaster, 8-slice toaster, bagel toaster | Chris’s Toaster Empire.” Titles like this promote worst practices and often result in having the same titles on most (if not all) pages on the site.
- long sentences
Anything longer than 70 characters is a waste. If you can’t describe this particular page in less than 70 characters, then perhaps you need to split it into multiple pages. From a practical point of view, Google will trim everything after 70 characters from the title and leave an ellipsis at the end of the title. As we can see in this example:
- Put your company name in front
In most cases, your website will rank well for your business name. Take advantage of the fact that search engines assign more weight to words that appear at the beginning of a page title, and form your titles with keyword phrases first, and then your company name.
Do you have other suggestions for improving page titles? Share your ideas in the comments.
Via: hubspot
