All Search engines use the Title tag in there indices. It is probably the most important on page element of a page. Think of a page title as the title of a book, if you are in a library and browsing a section of books the first thing you see is the page title. When your page shows up in a SERP the title tag is displayed and is the first thing the customer sees about you.
When you are constructing your page title use as many keywords as possible while making the title human readable. The title tag should be between 45-90 characters. Yahoo shows the full 90 characters that a browser can display while Google only shows 65. When you are trying to determine the keywords to use it is a good idea to look at overtures keyword tool, hitewise or word tracker. By utilizing these tools you will find qualifiers that may have otherwise been missed. To demonstrate this lets say you are trying to rank for the key phrase “Computer Cases” By adding Cool in front of the keyword for “Cool Computer Cases” you can also rank forlong tail search terms.
Browsers allow you to use 90 characters in your page title. However Google only allows 75 characters to work with in their page titles, and only display 60 – 65 characters in the SERP page. As best practices you should utilize the first 60 – 65 characters for SEO purposes. This is why we would never recommend putting the company name in your page title. By using the company name you would be wasting very valuable characters.
Yahoo! gives you a full 70-90 characters that they display as page titles in their Search Engine Results pages. You can be much more creative and comprehensive with Yahoo!
Points to Remember about your Page TItles
- Make Page titles highly targeted to the content on the web page
- Construct Page titles to capture searches from 5 – 10 different keywords or key phrases phrases
- Write them in a manner that is human readable
- Space out and repeat the main key phrase 1 – 2 times
- Unless branding messages contain keywords or key phrases you want to rank for don’t put them in your page titles.
- Page titles should be between 50-75 characters.
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