It’s one thing to get onto the front page of Google for your researched keywords, but what about making sure you stick out from the pack and get the kind of conversions you would like? Remember, on the front page of Google you are still one of ten possible results, so having an eye-catching HTML page title and description are exceedingly important.
To this end let’s look at the possible drivers for traffic, the methods you should use to help attract these different types of traffic, and look at some of the common mistakes made by content producers. Having discussed these, Let’s then cover some points for monitoring & testing things so you can optimise the optimisations yet further.
Types of Traffic
Understanding the kinds of people searching for your possible product/service/brand/info is key to the initial decision you will take on how to structure the content of your pages. Natural search traffic can come from one of 4 possible quadrants:
- Researching – Visitors looking for general information, aren’t necessarily sure what they are looking for but have some general ideas in mind.
- Educational – Looking for education, something instructional. Educational queries which might lead to goals or conversions.
- Interested – This type of visitor is looking at broad categories of products/services/info. They aren’t necessarily looking at specific or technical terms.
- Focused – This kind of visitor is highly targeted and is aiming their search at highly specific and technical terms. Likely the easiest to convert to your end goal.
Target & Goals
Ideally you want to make your page titles;
- Compelling – Titles need to engage and draw people in. Make your page titles compelling and easily readable. Avoid being long-winded and avoid using initial caps formatting. It’s easier to read normally structured & formatted phrasings. Use a clear call to action in the title.
- Keyword Rich – Make sure that 100% of the word usage is based on the researched core keyword qualifiers and modifiers. Use these based on the type of page and the type of your target audience.
- Targeted – To this end, think about the types of visitors, whether looking for specific products or for service in a geographic target area, you will need to include these kinds of word.
Things to Avoid
The following are common mistakes made by people when trying to optimise their HTML page titles.
- Not Unique – For starters you need to ensure that every single page title and description on your site is unique. Having as much variance as possible between the pages is always good, but is understandably difficult when you have a content managed site that generates large numbers of pages.
- Leading with Business Name – Using the business name as the first item in the title is fine if you are looking for brand recognition but is a waste of potential “Call to Action” space unless you are trying to build brand recognition. With unique business names, there’s less of a need to namecheck them in your page title for SEO reasons.
- Keyword Stuffing – Piling the page title high with a list of keywords is neither readable nor necessarily user or search engine friendly. This also reduces density and importance of words in the title.
- Repetition – Making use of the same word repeatedly will increase the instance of the matches for the terms but isn’t necessarily beneficial. Also, Google and other search engines are clever enough to understand that related words match, such as bike, bikes, bicycles, cycles etc.
- Lacking Description - Ensure that the title matches the content somewhat. You don’t want visitors to reach your site and find out the content of the page isn’t exactly what they are looking for.
- Too Long – Density of words is watered down if you write overly long titles. Aim to keep them concise and focused on your target words.
- Close & Direct Matching – Make sure the high priority keywords match with the description as well, and the domain/url. Also, a direct match for 2-3-4 word phrases is better than matches on scattered words.
- Lack Targeting – Use the pages and titles to match very specific targets. You might be focusing on hiring dresses on your home page, but very specific sub pages can focus more on geographic areas, to help draw possible clients in from those regions, where relevant.
Testing & Monitoring
Once you have set up and your optimised page titles and descriptions are in place you want to resubmit a new sitemap to the search engines and work on monitoring the performance of your pages. In your analytics for search terms on specific landing pages. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to analyse the search placements and the kinds of click-thrus, you are actually getting. Review the changes in keyword listings for your site.
Set goals in your analytics and monitor them. Google Analytics has some great goal monitoring and insights. All worth watching, and more a topic for another article. To this end, I think you have plenty of food for thought and plenty of ‘take home’. Picking the right words for your page titles can make a difference to your natural search traffic volume, not just in terms of impression on search results pages but also in terms of actual click-thrus.
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
George Rosier Mar 24, 2010
Good post: one should never underestimate the power of the H1 tag, either…
Vincent Roman Mar 24, 2010
Thanks George, so true!
I probably should have been more explicit, that this post is about the HTML page title [title]HTML Page Title[/title].
Yes the power of the H1 is strong, as I can attest to the changes I made on this very blog from the shoddy work done by Cutline developer Chris Pearson.
Thanks again!
ikumar Sep 28, 2010
The information given in the website is very useful. No one can give a detailed description about a small topic great.