Search Marketing and Internet Marketing Blog Online

There are many things to consider when beginning the SEO strategy for your website and each page within it. Aside from in-depth keyword research, the title you decide to assign to each page is arguably the most important thing to consider. Andy MacDonald, CEO of Swift Media UK provides a wonderful guest post at SEOptimize and provides a number of tips to follow:

There are several considerations when coming up with your page titles. Here are some of the key factors to consider:

• Unless you’re Microsoft, don’t use your company name in the page title. A better choice is to use a descriptive keyword or phrase that tells users exactly what’s on the page. This helps ensure that your search engine rankings are accurate
• Try to keep page titles to less than 50 characters, including spaces. Some search engines will index only up to 50 characters; others might index as many as 150. However, maintaining shorter page titles forces you to be precise in the titles that you choose and ensures that your page title will never be cut off in the search results.
• Don’t repeat keywords in your title tags. Repetition can occasionally come across as spam and is known as when a crawler is examining your site, so avoid repeating keywords in your title if possible, and never duplicate words just to gain a crawler’s attention. It could well get your site excluded from search engine listings.
• Consider adding special characters at the beginning and end of your title to improve noticeability. Parentheses (()), arrows (<<>>), asterisks (****), and special symbols like ££££ can help draw a user’s attention to your page title. These special characters and symbols don’t usually add to or distract from your SEO efforts, but they do serve to call attention to your site title.
• Include a call to action in your title. There’s an adage that goes something like, “You’ll never sell a thing if you don’t ask for the sale.” That’s one thing that doesn’t change with the Web. Even on the Internet, if you want your users to do something you have to ask them to.