Google Title Tag Optimization Update

Just yesterday Google posted to it’s Official Webmaster Central Blog the following:

“We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.

Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML. For example, a title using simply the word “Home” is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.” [full story]

Reading the post from Google Webmaster Central Blog about Title Tag Optimization, it reminds me of optimizing my first Title tag back in 1997, then it was the most powerful on-page SEO factor, although today it has lost some ranking weight but it’s still one of the strongest influencing on-page factors you can optimize. Craft your Title tag not only with the primary keyword phrase but if possible with a call-to-action or at least make sure the Title reads well… and include an optimized compelling and focused Description meta tag that goes hand-in-hand with that specific page’s optimized Title tag.

Things to keep in mind: Google Title Tag Length, 66 characters or less will be shown on the SERP but you can use a longer title with more keywords but do not go overboard as the words at the start of the title, prominence, are given the most weight.

If you haven’t heard, links are by far the most powerful way to get highly ranked for your keywords. These would be links from other websites, blogs, social media sites, news outlets, forums, doc sharing sites, photo sites, Q and A sites, etc., etc. So if you get your Title’s and Description tags right and garner enough links to that page with that specific keyword, your well-crafted Title tag should display in the SERPs avoiding the Google Title Tag Optimization updated news.

Related Words:
What Is Site Title
Page Titles SEO
Titles for Web Pages
SEO Page Title Length
Title Tags HTML

See more on: Google Title Tag Optimization

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