Every page of your website has a title tag, but by far the most critical title tag on your website is the title tag of your homepage. Unless you're involved in a very extensive long tail SEO campaign, your homepage will be the page that's ranked highest in the search engines, and it is the page most of your site visitors will find and visit first.
Your homepage title tag serves two primary purposes.
- It tells search engines about your website. This means what you say in your title tag will profoundly affect what keywords your website is ranked for and where your website ranks for those keywords.
- It tells visitors about your website. When you see a website listed in search results, that blue headline is the title tag of the site. This means your website needs to read like an ad and be compelling enough to convince visitors to click through and stick around.
If you've heard of title tags before, you've probably heard of them in the context of SEO. You've no doubt been told by an overly expensive SEO company that your title tags absolutely must include a massive string of keywords in order to get your website ranked where you want it.
But writing a good title tag means taking both goals into account. Your title tag must be search engine friendly and include the keywords that you want to rank for, of course, but those keywords must be put together to form a clear and compelling call to action that will drive clicks. Are these two goals at odds with each other? Sometimes. But not as often as you might think.
First of all, if any of the keywords in your website title tag match the keywords that a searcher has just typed into Google, those words will appear bold in the search results. This makes your website stand out, which improves the likelihood that he searcher will click on your site. Including keywords in your title tag, therefore, helps both SEO and conversions.
Second, the closer a keyword is to the beginning of the title tag, the more SEO weight it carries. Stuffing a lot of keywords into the beginning of the tag may seem to favor SEO rather than readability, but when done properly, this is not the case. Putting your important keywords front and center is often the best way to get a searcher to click on your website. After all, you're offering exactly what he or she is looking for.
Even so, you must make sure the title tag as a whole is readable, clear, concise, and compelling. This will require some good editing skills, since Google will only show the first 70 characters of your title tag on the search results page. If you have to err on one side or the other, sacrifice SEO power for the sake of coherence and conversions. There are many other ways to optimize your website to appear in search results, but no matter how good your SEO is, it won't help if your title tag doesn't communicate effectively.
How to Write a Compelling Title Tag
Writing a compelling title tag is a lot like writing a compelling anything else. Don't use the passive voice. Include at least one active verb. Express a complete thought. Include a call to action or reward, if possible. Be specific and succinct, and tell your visitors exactly what they need to hear.
Start with your primary keyword phrase, which is hopefully a specific product or service, like “web marketing” or “mortgage rate updates.” Follow this with an action verb, like “find” or “buy” or “download.” Follow this with a variation on your keyword phrase, like “website marketing resources” or “mortgage rate information.” Then close with your brand name, if you still have room for it.
Check out the following examples.
Mortgage Rate Updates – Download Mortgage Rate Information Free Today
Web Marketing – Find Top Website Marketing Resources – Agency Brand
Should You Include Your Brand Name in Your Title Tag?
Yes, if your brand name is known and trusted. If your website will carry more credibility because it belongs to your brand, definitely include your brand name in the website title tag. If, however, your website will not gain any credibility or will lose credibility because it belongs to your brand, don't include your brand name.
If you do include your brand name, should it come at the beginning or the end of the title tag, or somewhere in the middle? As mentioned above, the words that occur closest to the beginning of the title tag will carry the most SEO weight. This means that you should probably place your keywords at the beginning and your brand name at the end. But SEO is only half the picture, remember. The other half is conversion. Searchers are much more likely to notice your brand name if it's placed at the beginning of the title tag, and if your brand is what's driving conversions, as is definitely the case for companies like Nike or Apple or JetBlue, this becomes the important factor. Optimize your title tags to convert.
One Possible Exception That Warrants Further Study
There is a potential caveat to the standard best practices mentioned above, and, as always, it's the exceptions that are most exciting. Anecdotal evidence suggests that putting your brand name at the beginning of your title tag can increase the click through rate even for unknown brands, for one simple reason. What might this reason be? Think about it for a moment.
Only big, recognizable brands put their brand names first in their title tags. The overall shape or layout of the title tags for these successful, trustworthy, established brands is therefore “Brand Name – Brief Text and Keywords Here,” while the shape or layout of title tags for unknown websites is usually “Keywords Here, Keywords Here, Keywords Here, Here and Here.” Traditional SEO wisdom has led most webmasters to structure their tags this way. What do you suppose happens when an unknown brand puts its name first in the title tag despite its relative anonymity? Two things.
First, searchers are more likely to notice your title tag among search results. This is helpful if your website is ranked any deeper than, say, second place on the first page. The layout or structure of the title tag alone is what catches their attention, because they have been trained to notice major brand websites in this way.
Second, searchers may ascribe a certain degree of authority to your brand, assuming that you must be a leader or at least an emerging leader in your industry, if your title tag is structured as such. This would all happen subliminally, of course, due to the structure of the title tag.
Is this true? Possibly. But the traditional wisdom stands until new research is done. Still, it's an interesting possibility.
