If you want to build a money making blog, your top priority should be increasing your overall organic traffic as search traffic is the lifeblood for any successful website. In this guide, we’ll talk about the best practices for creating search engine friendly title tags for your pages.
What are SEO friendly title tags?
A title tag is an HTML element that describes the title of a blog post or page. An SEO friendly title tag is usually optimized for search engines and it usually specifies the context of a page. So your goal while writing title tags should be making them as relevant and accurate as possible and they should provide a proper description of a page’s content. Are title tags still important? Yes, they are extremely important. Titles are the first thing people see. Not only on search engines but they appear everywhere, including social media sites, forums, email lists and so on. Did you know that 8 out of 10 people read your headlines first before they even decide to read your blog posts? That’s the reason why you should craft high quality and compelling titles for your blog posts. Enough said about the title tags. Let’s now talk about how you can create a search engine friendly title tags for your pages to improve your organic rankings in 2023 and beyond.
8 Best Practices of Writing SEO Friendly Titles
Yes, there will be a ton of duplicate titles for similar contents on Google search results but you need to make sure to create unique and highly engaging titles if you want to boost rankings. Uniqueness is extremely important when it comes to optimizing your posts, titles and content to get more traffic from search engines like Google. You should aim at creating titles that are good for both search engine bots and visitors. Make sure to create relevant titles as Google crawlers might get confused if you write irrelevant page titles for your web pages. Another important thing is using unique titles while interlinking. You should make sure each page on your website has a different title. It should not be the case that the same title is used for multiple pages within your website. We noticed lots of website owners copying their home page titles in their website internal pages. You should ignore such practices. Try to keep your titles under 60 characters. According to Moz, you can expect about 90% of your titles to show up properly in Google search results if your titles are under 60 characters. Google often shows the first 50 to 60 characters of a title tag. There’s no thumb rule though but it’s a smart idea to keep your titles short and compelling. There’s no exact character limit though because characters can vary in width. Did you know that Google’s display titles max out at 600 pixels currently? Another smart thing to do is to avoid characters that usually take up more space. For instance, character like uppercase “W” is wider than a lowercase character like “e”, “l”, “i”, “t” and so on. Have a look at the screenshot below to understand it better: As you can see from the above example, width matters a lot. That’s why smartly use characters that don’t take up more space while displaying in search results. Quick note: Avoid using ALL CAPS letters in your titles at any cost as they are NOT only harder for search visitors to read but they also display less characters as they take up more width (and space) in search results. So they get truncated! If you’re wondering about different types of stop words to be avoided in title tags, here’s a list of some of them. Try to avoid using stop words as much as you can, especially in title tags to save more space. Also make sure to avoid using these stop words in your URLs as well and make them short and sweet by keeping your primary keywords in mind. Here’s how it looks like; As you can see above, without stop words, your URLs will look SEO friendly and also great for user experience. Instead what else can you do? Use describing words. Yes, you can use some descriptive words towards the beginning of page titles to make your website titles look more natural. Instead of using short keywords, focus on LSI keywords on your page titles. LSI keywords often make your headlines more click worthy and give extra weight to your SEO efforts. There are the 3 most important elements involved in creating click worthy titles which are; Let’s briefly talk about each one of them with examples. Curiosity: You need to create curiosity while creating titles to increase your organic clicks. Have a look at the following example. As you can see above, you’ll instantly click on it for more details especially if you’re desperately looking to get rich. That’s the power of curiosity. So use it wisely while crafting your titles. Benefit: Want to dramatically improve your organic clicks? Start showing benefits within your title tags and you’ll get amazing results. Here’s an example of it. As you can see from the above example, it’s a benefit oriented title where it says how green tea can help you lose weight which is really interesting especially for the ones who are searching to reduce their tummy fat. Emotion: Do you know why most people buy online? They connect with other brand’s emotions (or a particular product). People buy Apple products for that “ultra-premium” emotion. Here’s an example of how an emotion driven title looks like; The above example is how an emotional title looks like. If anyone who’s going through a breakup and finds an emotional driven title like the above one, most probably will click it to get more information. So there you go. Use the above 3 elements smartly according to the topics you cover (or keywords you target) to create click-worthy titles. We have written a detailed guide around using Semrush for finding profitable keywords where you can find a ton of details. Just make sure to include your primary keyword within your title for better rankings. A primary keyword is extremely important and if you want to rank your pages in search engines like Google, you need to target at least one primary keyword for each page. Coming up with primary keywords is simple when you have access to the tools like Semrush. LSI keywords are semantically relevant keywords to a particular keyword. For instance, “Apple” is an LSI keyword for iPad, MacBook, iPhone etc Yes, you should definitely include a primary keyword within your title tags but if you want to optimize your titles naturally, you should target LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords. If you want to find LSI keywords for SEO, use proper tools like Semrush, Ubersuggest etc as they provide you extensive keyword phrases. Important tip: Put important keywords first Last but not least, keep an eye on all the top 10 ranking titles for the topic you’re writing about. Find out if they are using how-to’s, list posts or something else. Did you notice anything in common? Craft your titles accordingly. Do you want to know the BEST SEO tip in writing SEO friendly page titles? Use your primary keyword first. For example, if you are targeting a keyword like “belly fat reduction tips”, there are several ways to craft SEO titles including; Among the above two cases, you will be more benefited from search engines by using #1. Why? Because keywords still play a prominent role and search crawlers easily find the context of users if you are using your target keywords in prominent places such as using them at the beginning of your title tags. But you should make sure that you don’t use too many keywords in your page title tag section. Also, focus on making your titles localized. If you are aiming at getting higher rankings for certain keywords in certain demographics, you should use them in your page title section. If you have a recognized brand name, you should definitely include it for better conversions and click through rates. But if you’re just getting started and no one knows your brand name, you should try to avoid as it takes more space (so you’ll have less space and width to target your primary keywords within titles). Suppose if an SEO company is offering SEO services in a particular city like Delhi, should include Delhi in their title tag with keywords relevant to that page. Their website’s meta title could be something like ‘Premium SEO Services in Delhi’ or something similar. Here’s how most of the SERP results on Google looks like; As you can see above, a search result includes a title along with URL and meta description. We also implement a rich snippet for product review (that’s why star ratings are also appearing in the SERP results). So far, we’ve discussed about creating search engine friendly titles, so let’s now talk about how to create better meta descriptions to improve your overall organic rankings. Writing search engine friendly meta description like a pro According to Google’s blog, there’s no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the search results are often truncated as needed (usually to fit the device width such as desktop, laptop, smartphones etc). The meta description length is between 120 to 158 characters, up to 920 pixels. Keep in mind that Google users also read meta description of your pages that appear on Google SERPs along with the titles. Meta description is what comes under your page titles on Google search results. By using your focused keywords even on meta description can give you ultimate SEO traffic, so don’t forget optimizing your rich snippets (aka meta description). Always supplement your SEO friendly titles with a great meta description every time you publish post. This way you can improve your click through rates as well as the user engagement on your sites and web pages. Keep your meta description under 120 to 150 characters, otherwise Google SERPs ignore the remaining extra characters (so it gets truncated). Write your meta description for the users first, Google obviously gives you top priority then. Never keyword stuff your meta description and optimize them naturally. So what are the recommended optimization plugins? Using plugins like Yoast SEO can help you implement most of the things that are covered in this article (including titles, meta descriptions, other tags etc). These plugins are free and even SEO beginners can use the suggestions given by SEO by Yoast plugin to get more organic traffic to their websites. We’ve 2 recommendations which are listed below. It is the most downloaded SEO plugin with over 20 million downloads and it’s free version also offers a wide range of features to optimize your content. When it comes to on page optimization and creating amazing titles for Google, Yoast SEO plugin is the best. We’ve been using this amazing plugin (we’re using premium version though) for a long time now and we’re extremely happy with its features and results. Here’s how its interface looks like from backend; As you can see above, you can easily add a focus keyword, change your title, add meta description, improve your social media settings and so on from one place. Here’s how it looks like; Rank Math is the new entry but quickly gained popularity among blogging community as it offers a ton of useful features ranging from optimizing upto 5 keywords to creating sitemaps, LSI tool integration, 404 monitor, redirection system and the list goes on. As you can see above, it’s extremely easy to setup and you can tweak any SEO related changes you want ranging from adding nofollow links to setting up sitemaps, importing settings from other plugins and so on. If you’re looking for an alternative to Yoast SEO plugin, Rank Math is definitely worth giving a try as it offers excellent features. So there you go! Start using optimization plugins to get more traffic and better results from search engines without sweating much. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions around title tags.
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Browse more SEO Tutorials: → Your titles are stuffed with too many keywords (avoid over optimizing your titles as using one primary keyword in your titles is enough most of the times)→ Your titles are not matching up with the query or user’s intent (so create titles that define the context and intent of the topic you cover) → Firstly, login to Google Search Console→ Navigate to Performance→ Click on the tab called “Pages”→ Now, simply find a list of all the pages that you would like to measure, click on them. Then, click on the “Queries” tab.
Final thoughts
Before publishing your blog posts, make sure their page titles are under 60 characters. Find and use your focused keywords on your page titles to rank high and use them in the beginning of your titles to gain more weight. Don’t over optimize. Use compelling meta description along with great titles to increase your organic click through rates from SERPs. Do you have any more questions on writing search engine friendly titles? Share your thoughts in the comments.
