Keyword use in the title tag

So many years have passed and still i come across pages that say “Home Page” or “Page 1″ in the title of their pages. Or better still the same title repeated continuously throughout the website.

First off lets concentrate on the importance of the title tag, it is one of the most important ranking factors for search engine rankings, this machine readable content is translated into search engine listings and gives you and me an idea of what your page is about, if it reads as “page 1″ i am not going to click it, are you? I thought not

This far down the line, Google updates have ensured that results with “page 1″ are not highly listed relevant results, you are on page 986 and i don`t go that deep my friend.

The title tag represents what the content on your page is about, in a summarised way, much like the the lead headline of any paper you pick up.  the relevancy of your title tag to the pages content has to have a theme, a keyword relationship, something that both you and me as the visitor and the search engine robots can at a glance decide if the page is worth exploring further.

How long can the title tag be?

Take a look for yourself, go to Google and search for anything you like somewhere in those results you will see the titles of pages trailing off with…. you will also notice those results will have quite a few stop words in there like and, if, but, a, by, the, of and so on, using the Newspaper metaphor, how many headlines do you see in the title tag, not more than two eh? Why? Simply because you can get your message across in less.  It looks like 50 characters (including spaces)is about right but who knows for sure, the length is not as important as what is in it, it just saves that ugly looking trail off imo.

Keyword usage

So how much is too much? If it looks unnatural, then it is unnatural, sure you need to be using your keyword in the the tag but, this bot grabber may as well have greasy gloves on if you are going to start stuffing it with the keyword.

Link Love

Sooner or later your visitors are going to link to your well thought out content and more often than not they will be using your title tags as the anchor text of their links, so a well thought out title, relevant to your content is a must.