And now for the single most important on-page SEO element (behind content) for a website — the Title Tag! Believe it or not, title tags are even more important to the search engines than the URL of your website. The reason? The search engines use title tags to determine what your site is about and use this information when indexing your site.
What is a title tag? A title tag is the page title that appears in the top of your browser window when visiting a website. This is copied into search engine results when someone searches for keywords that pertain to a website.
In order to make the most of title tags and their power to rocket you to the top of search results, follow these title tag best practices —
- Include no more than 70 characters.
- Include your city and state. You should include either the spelled out version of your state, like “South Dakota”, or the abbreviated version, such as “SD”, based on which is more common for your state. Some states are more common to be spelled out, like “Indiana”, when someone searches online and some, like “NY”, are more commonly abbreviated.
- Include one or two keywords.
- Include your business name.
- It’s typically best to include a description of your website using the rules above followed by a delimiter like a pipe “|” character followed by your business name.
A perfectly optimized example would be: Pierre, SD LTL Trucking Company | ABC Trucking Inc.
How do you implement a title tag on your site? It should be added inside the <head> section of your website HTML code in the <title> element — <title>Add your title tag here</title>. You should always start by optimizing your home page first and then begin to optimize other popular landing pages for your website. The best practice for optimizing title tags on secondary pages is to include a keyword rich title for the page followed by a delimiter like a pipe followed by your business name. Example: About Us| ABC Trucking Inc.
