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Your search engine optimization efforts include many different ways to get your website higher on sites like Google, but some are more important than others. Before worrying about how many backlinks you have or how many blog posts you’ve written, a good website should always have keyword rich title tags. Similar to our recent post about Why Buying A Domain Name That Includes Your Keyword Is Important, the title is also one of the most important factors in good SEO.

The title tag is like a headline, it appears at the top of the web browser when your homepage is open, and it also is what appears on the search engine results page when your site is listed. Because of these factors, it is important to remember that what you write in your title is not only for search engines to crawl and find keywords in it, but it is also likely that your title will be the first thing someone reads about your website. You don’t want to write something that is just keyword after keyword, because someone reading that won’t be very compelled to click on it.

One basic rule for incorporating keywords into the title tag is to use your most important keywords first, because the order in which the words are plays a role in how search engines scan it. It is more important to use different keywords in the title than to repeat any keywords, because the title will be more relevant to a wider variety of keyword searches if you use your 2-3 most significant keywords. You don’t want the title to be too long, so keep the number of characters including spaces to less than 75. For example, Design & Promote’s title, Chicago SEO Web Design And Search Engine Optimization Design & Promote, is 70 characters with spaces, and you can see when searching for “Naperville web design” on Google that the whole title appears, not just a portion of it followed by three dots:

D&P-Google-Title

Once you have the basic title down, here are a few more tips to make it even better. If you want to include your company name in the title, make sure it is at the end. Some companies rely on their geographic location, which is a good thing to include in the website’s title. Finally, make sure every page on your website has a unique title which distinguishes the content of that specific page. This will help search engines crawl your pages and also help visitors to your site navigate through it.

Below are two examples of title tags that different websites are using. As you can see, the first one needs some improvement. This title is for the a bakery in Chicago. As you can see, they only used “Home Page” and left out the most important keywords that they want people to search to find them online.

Chicago Bakery Title

The second one follows the most important rules. It uses the most important keywords first, is the right length, and it makes sense when reading it.

Design & Promote Title