Onsite SEO Title Tips 

The SEO title is very important to writing a blog or a post. It is sad to say that a lot of people misunderstand how to use the title of the post or page. They treat is like regular newspaper copy. Newspaper editors have a lot more leeway when it comes to how a title is made. However, as the writer for online content, there are certain rules you need to follow!

Using Keyword Strategy For The Title

If you have not done so, go back and read Simple Strategic Keyword Hierarchy. This whole week of blog posts were made as a tutorial for what to do with a list of keywords after doing keyword research.

When creating your blog or page post, you want your primary keyword to be as close to the front of the title as possible. This has the added benefit of making it easy to find your keyword when organizing a lot of data! The SEO requirements of maintaining a lot of data should be in place before you even write the first title into your page or post.

SEO Title Examples

Take this example: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Outsourcing For Hiring Qualified Virtual Assistants

That is an awesome title for sales copy, but it does not belong as part of your page or post. It is too long, and the important keyword is not examined by the search engines when titles are like this.

So, consider making the around 40 characters. Strategically, this gives you some wiggle room for social media things later. Adjusting for this new information, the new title could be: Virtual Assistants – Learn What To Ask.

Site Title And Tagline SEO

This is something that comes up when people ask about titles, so I am going to address it here. There is an opportunity for people to give a title to their site and also make a tagline.

When giving a title to your site, you still have the same restrictions on spacing; you want to keep your site title short and descriptive to your niche. This means that you might need to ditch the company name in the site title.

Letting go of the branding and ego is something that is very hard for people to do, but consider this: If your homepage has your business name as its keyword, then Google will examine it just fine. It does not have to be a part of the site title!

On a different note, I see so many people struggling with doing SEO for their taglines. I need to give my two cents here! I really despise taglines when writing pages or posts. My biggest issue with taglines is that they mess up the keyword placement in the content and the SEO meta description, too.

[I personally think slamming a subheading (Header 2) underneath the title (Header 1) looks bad. Tag lines are meant for paper sales copy – not for optimized website post or page content. Please include the tagline information as part of the copy, but place it in the middle of the copy rather than at the top of it.]

Making Use Of Yoast SEO Title Tag

For WordPress sites, there is a plug in that really helps with SEO called Yoast. I really recommend installing it to see what things you can do to improve your SEO as you go – this includes doing SEO videos, too.

I find it invaluable for working with titles, because of these reasons: 1) It lets me know if my title is too long or too short. 2) It lets me know if my keyword is in the title properly – I have misspelled a keyword in the title before.

What’s In A Name?

Bringing this all together, there are a few things to consider with making the SEO title. Make sure that the title is not too long or short. Get rid of taglines (if you can live without them) as blog or page posts are not meant for traditional sales copy. Make sure your keyword is spelled properly in the title.

If using WordPress, do not save your page or blog post before doing the SEO URL properly. If you do save it early, you start creating 404 errors within your system that Google examines. Keep your URL clean, and do not save until you have read the instructions on URLs!

What have you learned about SEO title requirements? Please comment below!