The title tag is arguably the single most important meta tag in regard to on-page optimization. Actually, it’s important on 2 fronts. Both as an SEO metric for ranking, and as one of the first things a potential clicker will see.

Let’s start with the SEO part.

The title tag should be very short. I suggest no more than 65 - 70 characters. It should also be very heavy in your major desired search terms. Keyword research aside, I’ll give a few examples.

We often see titles with a ’sales pitch’ feel to them, often including words that aren’t very useful in ranking factors like “and” and “for” and “the.”

Ex. (bold means search term) SEO Factor the best in Website Optimization and Internet Promotion.

Though containing our major search terms for one of the pages, it also contains a lot of words that are either omitted from results anyway, or taking up precious weight from the search terms. You see, there are a total of ten words in this title, giving each word in the title a 10% weight to it. If we reduce it to be a bit more concise, we are left with a lot more weight.

Ex. SEO Factor - Website Optimization | Internet Promotion

Now, there are 6 words in the title, the majority of which are our search terms. Now, each of the search terms has about a 17% weight. Furthermore, our major terms are getting a 34% weight.

Now for the semantics. There is a huge debate on whether a company should be in the title tag at all, and where it should go. Obviously, the company name can take up some characters, but we believe there is a good reason to have it in there.

We, as SEO Factor, offer a small bit of marketing services to our larger accounts as well as optimization. Because of this, we work a lot with brand recognition, and getting the name out there. So, if someone were to type your company’s name into a search engine, it would be nice to rank. Also, if someone knew who you were, but searched for a specific product, it would be nice to show that your company offers this product, allowing the potential customers too see, and hopefully remember the last experience of dealing with, your company.

There is also a debate on whether the company name should be first or last in the title. I can’t say that I’ve seen a difference in any cases, but it’s a good theory that a word appearing even slightly before another would be more important. After all, this is indeed the case in regard to site copy. We like to use the company name first for the homepage, and unless it is also a search term, last on all the sub pages.

I hope this helps out a little in understanding the title tag. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

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