Meta tags optimization is very important to your SEO efforts; specifically the Title Tag. If you do not use a Title Tag, the search engines will use text from your page to display as the title for the page. This is scary because you’re leaving it up to them to determine what the important information is on your page. And usually they get it completely wrong. Don’t let them decide, create your own titles!

Not to worry though. While this is an important part of applying SEO to your site, its rather easy. The time required to accomplish this task depends on how many pages you have on your site but you can expect about 5 minutes per page once you have the titles written and ready to apply.

Why You Need to Optimize Title Tags

When you use a search engine to find a website you’ll enter your key words, hit enter, and review the results page listing the different websites that have been returned. The information shown by the search engines for each listing usually comes from Meta tags on those websites.

In the above image you can see three listings with a blue link, some text below the link, and a green URL at the bottom. Ignore the other junk, its not important right now.

You will use the Title Tag and the Description Tag to tell the search engines to show in their listings when your site shows up.

Where the Title Tag is Used

The Tag is used by the search engines as a title to your website’s listing. That is the line in blue.

The Title Tag is important, very important. It is suspected that the Title Tag is one of the most important variables that search engines use to evaluate where and when to show your website in their listings.

Optimizing Title Tags

The structure of your title tags is really up to you as long as you follow one particular rule. The Title Tag length should land between 60 and 80 characters or it will get chopped off in the results page. 

While these are not rules you MUST follow, here are a few good practices to get into when creating your Title Tags.

  • Create a unique title for every page.
  • Be sure to put your keyword near the beginning of the title tag.
  • Do NOT stuff your title tag with keywords
  • The title should be an excellent representation of the content on the page
  • DO NOT try to fool the engines.

How To Update the Title Tag

Now that you know why it is important to have Title Tags, here is how to update them.

The HTML for your Title Tags is found near the top of the page if you view the source code.

If you know how to update the HTML of your website, you can do it here. If you need a little help making sure you use the correct HTML tags for your Title Tag, use the SEO Book Meta Tag Tool. Its nifty.

If you’re using a Content Management System (CMS) then there should be a way to update them within the CMS. Each CMS has different ways to do this.

Now that you have your Title Tags set up, its time to make sure your Description Tags are in place to do their job too!