SEO Help for Page Title

How to choose a good Page Title

Search Engine Optimization may have different opinions on what work and what doesn’t; but there’s one point on which we all agree: the Page Title is one of the most important (if not the most) part of your SEO campaign.

This post is to give you some SEO help on how to choose a good Page Title for each of your website or blog page.

The Page Title is the one piece of on-page SEO that carries the most weight for the search engines. So using it correctly or wrongly will dramatically affect your results.

In fact, it saddens me when I see pages with a title page such as “Welcome to my site” or even worst, “Untitled”.

You may know or not, but the title page is the text that is displayed on top of your window; and believe it or not it is more than just a description title. In fact whatever you put there will be decisive for the search engines to decide what your page is all about!

Now, we all know (or at least by now you should) that search engine optimization revolves around keywords. Well, the page title is no exception.

Each of your pages should not be optimized for more than 2-3 keywords. Those should be seen in your page title. Another very important point to remember with the page title is that each word use has a specific weight value.

This means the more words you’ll be using in your page title, the weaker the weight of each of the word you are using, and if your keywords are lost within a sea of irrelevant words, they will lose their identity; however proper keywords arrangement in the page title can enhance their weight value to your advantage.

But enough explanation, it’s time to see the real example.

We’ll assume that our website is about dogs, and that we want to optimize our page with the keywords “dog food” and “healthy dog”.

Case 1: “Untitled” or “Welcome to my site” types of page titles.

In this SEO case, we forgot to put a title or put an irrelevant title on our page. This tells the search engines that our website is 100% about “Untitled”, or 25% of “Welcome” 25% of “to” 25% of “my” and 25% of “site”.

Obviously, we are on a very bad start to get the mythic number 1 rank on Google…

Case 2: “Find good dog food to get your dog happy and healthy”

As you understand the previous calculation shown in case 1, each word used in the title has the same weight. This time, we included one keyword written exactly conform, and the second keyword, split in the title.

Probably well intended, we formulated a nice sentence. The truth in SEO is that it is more harmful than helpful when it comes to the page title. Here “dog food” will account for about 15% of the weight of the title where “healthy dog” will account for about 7% as being split.

That would bring our total relevancy to about 22% related to our niche, better than Case 1 for sure, but far from being good.

Case 3: “Dog Food and Healthy Dog”

Now we are getting much better! We have our 2 keywords explicitly in the page title bringing our relevancy to 80%, but can we do better?

Case 4: “Dog Food | Healthy Dog”

Do you remember when I told you that each word in the page title carried some weight? It’s time to remove those excess words. Replacing the word “and” by “|” is a great way to do it as the search engines don’t consider this symbol as a word. That is your page title is now considered to have only 4 words, your keywords.

Now “dog”, “food” and “healthy” each accounts for 25% of relevancy. Since “dog” appear twice, it would raise its relevancy to 50%.

That brings now your page relevancy to your niche at 100%. This sounds perfect, but can we do better?

Case 5: “Healthy Dog Food”

Yes we can! And here it is, blending the keywords together!

Now, “Healthy” and “Food” account each for 33% relevancy (as there’s only three words), and “dog” should then account for 33% too.

Wrong! The search engines are smart and they can recognize your keywords, it’s like the word “dog” was appearing twice in two sets of 3 words title, instead of one set of 4 keywords. This means the relevancy of “dog” is doubled!

You now have a Page Title that tells the search engines that your site is:

* 33% relevant to “healthy”
* 33% relevant to “food”
* 50% relevant to “healthy dog”
* 50% relevant to “dog food”
* 66% relevant to “dog”
* 132% relevant to your niche!

I hope you enjoy my SEO help on Page Title!

To Your Success!