What’s up with title tags?

Originally published at PhysicalTherpay.Marketing physicaltherapy.marketing/whats-up-with-title-tags/

Being the website owner and probably a Google user, you’ve likely come across the title tag.

But you’ve probably seen it in the wild, like this:

This is for a local physical therapy clinic. They have three locations and serve clients in three cities and two states. 

In Google, the results like the above example, are called Search Engine Results Pages, (we like to call them SERPS). This is going to be the first experience a visitor will have with your website. As SEO professionals we look at the Title tag for each page in your site and optimize it for the best search results.

Doing this serves two purposes. 

1. It makes a mini-ad for each page indexed in your website. Indexed means that the search engine finds and displays that page. This is important for a actual person who is searching for your services or locations. 
2. It helps search engines decide what lkeywords you’ll likely rank for and what position.  

We want to write the Title tag in such a way that it makes sense for a person and a software algorithm. We need to entice a human to click the link to your page and entice software to show the link and display it high in the rankings. 

Your title tag also shows up in tabs for web browser tabs.

And in social media posts. 

Many clients ask me how to edit how their social media accounts to display different text then what is pulled in. There’s a method for that we can cover later, called social cards.

For now, its your title tag. You may need to update it yourself or have your website professional make that update. 

But, whats in a title?

Titles are pretty important and they can be an easy fix to improve your SEO and site rankings. But there are a few things to watch out for. 

Title length

Like a tweet, you have a limited set of characters for the title tag. Now this changes as search engines make edits to their designs, but a good rule of thumb is about 60 characters. Now this is a challenge, especially when your business is called Apex Physical Therapy & Wellness. What can you do? Well, it is important to focus each page on a keyword. You could focus the home page, location and contact page with they keyword physical therapy.  While using something like Massage; Deep Tissue, Sports | Apex PT & Wellness for another page like your massage page. 

Avoid using all caps. These are the equivalent to yelling at the reader. And all caps take up more space. You’ll have even less characters to use. 

If your title it too long Google and others cut the title short and adds these ”…” to indicate that is was truncated. 

A couple of pitfalls.

Don’t overdo keywords

Keywords are important, but they aren’t everything. Avoid just stuffing the titles with keywords. Remember, your title is a mini-ad for your website. Ain’t no one clicking on a list of keywords. Search engines are smart enough now to assume the searcher wants local cities or near me and even variations of the same keywords.

Don’t stuff it, this isn’t a turkey.

Make each title unique

Its tempting to make each title tag the same and its quicker when building your site. But each page should have different content, why have the first exposure to this page showing the same title as the next page? Avoid using titles like Home, New Page, etc. If you have these make sure you change them ASAP. Make sure to update the title page as you update content. A big no-no is a title page offering service X and content stating you don’t offer it. Its confusing, or annoying to your visitors and Google will catch on and possibly penalize your site. 

Start applying these tips for better title tags. You’ll start to see some improvement on your site rankings and traffic. Nufire Markekting can help with a website assessment or even get you started with an SEO health check up. 

Next week, I’ll have three more tips for writing great title tags.

Getting down to the bottom of these may feel a little daunting. Feel free to reach out to Nufire Marketing for help in your content marketing strategy.

Written by Avery Nubson
Avery can be reached at avery@nufiremarketing.com