SEO - Title Tags

In the world of search engine optimization, title tags are one of the most important "on site" optimization that you can do to influence the search engine rankings. It only takes a few minutes to optimize a title tag and the results that will occur during the long run are greatly beneficial. If you follow the steps blow, you too can have great success with your rankings.

Keyword Research

To begin, you need to start with some keyword research. Keyword research may be foreign to a lot of you, but it is a pretty easy concept that has great effect on your success. When doing keyword research, you need to place certain keywords in a cluster, which means to group like phrases together. This is how you do it.

• Decide upon the main phrase that for a web page
• Type it into a keyword tool like Word Tracker
• Choose a handful (5) of the most relevant phrases to be in your cluster

That is about it! Once you decide on the cluster that you want to use for the web page you are optimizing, you are ready to create your highly effective title tag!

Title Tag

There are certain best practices when creating title tags. If you follow them, you will be putting yourself way in front of the competition.

• Prominence- You need to place your most important phrase closest to the beginning of the tag as possible. This gives that keyword the most power in the eyes of Google.
• Density- You should focus on using a combination of the phrase within the cluster to help increase the density of the main phrase. The more times your keyword shows up in your title tag the better. But, don't get too trigger happy, too many can and will hurt you! I would show your exact keyword no more than three to four times.
• Use plurals and singulars where applicable
• Understand that the longer your title tag becomes, the more diluted the strength of each keyword becomes.

Keep in mind that you need to create a title tag for every page of your website. If you follow these guidelines when creating your title tags, you site will have that much more power in the search engines. Also keep in mind that every phrase that you are going after has different amounts of competition and there is no set way that works best in all situations. The only way to find this out is to continually do testing on the title tags and analyze your competition.

No matter what, in the world of SEO, link building is the most important thing you can do to increase your search engine rankings. Don't become too obsessed with tweaking your title tags to the point where you focus only on that. Create some solid title tags and start building links and you will be well on your way!