Comments on: Title Tags and SEO

By: Justin

Justin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:36:01 +0000

I heard that the title tags acceptable by search engines are getting a bit longer, more along the lines of 70-80 chars, but I have heard many experts say no more than 60 chars. I personally try to keep them around 60 or so.

By: Ali R Khan

Ali R Khan — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:26:58 +0000

WOW Darren You are not just a Blogger, You are becoming a SEO Expert too :)

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:04:59 +0000

Don’t forget Bookmarks. When you bookmark a site its gonna use whatever is in your title tags.. so if there is no Blog Name readers won’t know where that link will take them.

By: web designer

web designer — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 21:29:48 +0000

I agree with you :)

By: 75 Resources That Will Help You Write Better Content · un/popular web culture

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:50:08 +0000

[...] Title Tags and SEO [...]

By: Finance crash-test dummy

Finance crash-test dummy — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 06:36:52 +0000

Darren,

I decided to try out the Post Title method instead of the current Blog Name | Post Title as I was getting high in the SE’s but thought that by changing this I might get a little higher.

I updated all my individual archives and have had the Googlebot respider my idexes in the last 2 days. Since then I haven’t had one person come to me via Google and my keyword rankings in Digitalpoint have all dropped out of the default top 200 pages for specific keywords.

Please tell me this is only temporary!

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 20:42:01 +0000

I found the code for Post title | Site Title

and for Post title | Site Title

What is it for just… Post title… on an individual page?

By: 网页Title的优化探讨 | SEO探索

网页Title的优化探讨 | SEO探索 — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 17:08:43 +0000

[...] 　　近日Problogger的 Darren Rowse撰写了一篇Title Tags and SEO的文章，尽管其探讨的是Blog中网页Title的优化原则，但其中的策略对大多数网站均适用。 [...]

By: Stefan

Stefan — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 16:24:46 +0000

I like good title-tags and hate title spamming (word1, word2, word3…). Unfortunately they are so vital. I changed my title at May1st Reboot and added the two main keywords of my site to every title. This brought me up from page 5 or 6 to the top place. But it’s even important in which order the words are. I would really favour if Google would lower the importance of title tags as they should describe the content of the page and are not to be used for advertising or buzzwords.

By: A.S.P

A.S.P — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 11:45:58 +0000

When choosing your title you should always try to get your main key word / key phrase in the title tag.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 18:34:30 +0000

Excellent ideas here. I have been using Post Name | Blog Title, but now I’m considering dropping the blog title and seeing what happens search-engine wise.

By: Joe Balestrino - Mr SEO

Joe Balestrino - Mr SEO — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 12:12:49 +0000

The best thing to do is to pick your title carefully and put that in your title. So, if you are talking about title tags and SEO, then that should be the title. The name of the blog can be in the title as well however, it needs to be short.
Remember there are restrictions on how long the title tag should be.

By: Don M

Don M — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 20:05:38 +0000

I noticed that by getting rid of the “branding” stuff like *blog title* is good for Adsense Targeting as well. At least for me I noticed a big difference.

On one of my blogs, it has “blogging” in the title. It is a blog, but it’s not a blog about blogging – it’s about songwriting. But too often I would have “RSS Reader” and “How To Blog ads” showing up in my AdSense ads.

Now that I removed the name of the blog from my title tags I get almost none of that.

This is a good tip. Thanks Darren.

-dm

By: Eitan

Eitan — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 19:17:29 +0000

I’m also big into making sure my titles describe the article perfectly. That’s not really an SEO thing but a person-reading-it thing. It’s a tease for me to write an article called “Paris Hilton’s Ears Explode” and then talk about her going to some club with loud music. Although that might be a good post…

By: Melissa Wiley

Melissa Wiley — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:07:43 +0000

Thanks so much, as always, for the useful information. Do you know if there is a way to customize this in Typepad using the Custom CSS option? What goes between ?

By: pcunix

pcunix — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:59:49 +0000

Google is “much smarter than that” but they also sometimes turn us into dull, repetitive writers.

As Jon Henshaw says above “The ideal set up for a blog and/or entire site is to have the most important keywords at the beginning of the Title, in the H1 element (if appropriate) and within the first and/or second paragraph.”

But if we were writing for people rather than a half-dumb, half smart search engine, it would be the thought that counts: in other words, if my title is “Love, peace, and war”
and my first paragraph makes it plain that I’m talking about marriage :-), a human is mart enough to see the relationship, while Google probably isn’t. I don’t know if Google is quite smart enough to grok the relationship of a title like “High Definition Video” and the sentence “New standards required for broadcasters should have required most of us to upgrade our sets by now, but the widespread adoption of cable and satellite dishes has delayed that need” but humans certainly are.

I’d say Google does a pretty fair job even if you aren’t too careful about your form of address. Personally, I’d rather write for people but unfortunately I am always aware that Google is looking over my shoulder.

By: Jon Henshaw

Jon Henshaw — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:10:47 +0000

Page Titles are extremely important. I’ve seen dramatic SERP results on many different websites after optimizing the Titles. For the Sitening Blog, I tend to want to emphasize particular keywords and phrases, so I put what’s most important to me first. Personally, I believe that more weight is given to the initial words as opposed to how many words you actually have in the Title (as you suggested).

The ideal set up for a blog and/or entire site is to have the most important keywords at the beginning of the Title, in the H1 element (if appropriate) and within the first and/or second paragraph. This has been a proven technique for me. Although the key here is appropriate use of keywords. You can’t just throw certain keywords on a page and expect good results if it doesn’t relate to your site, the page content, etc… Google is much smarter than that.

By: Thomas Silkjær

Thomas Silkjær — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:05:09 +0000

First thing: Darren, thanks for referring to my blog :)

Second: I use “Post title | blog title” because e.g. on Google, people will see my titles (related to their search) instead of the blog name – you know it from yourself, quickly looking at search results, you don’t really read closely. Especially longer blog titles would hide the posts title on Google if you use “blog title | post title”.

By: Lobo235

Lobo235 — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:03:14 +0000

I have chosen to only use the post title. I have had excellent results in the search engines as I have gotten better at writing good title tags that entice the user to visit my site. I highly recommend just using the post title from an SEO standpoint. In a world where so much information is available from so many sources branding can be hard to accomplish unless you have a site of a considerable size with a good reputation. Focusing on SEO is the wiser choice for small to medium size blogs/sites as it will bring more traffic than a focus on branding.

By: jim

jim — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:24:30 +0000

I put Post Name by Blog Name simply because it is more likely someone will do a search in Google for keywords in my Post Name than in my title name. Google has a nice feature where they bold the search terms and so it makes it more likely that my result will have more bolded words than if I did the reverse (Blog Name feats. Post Name, or something to that effect) and thus catch more eyes.