Search Engine Optimization: The Title Tag

Welcome to the third video post on Daily Blog Tips (there is a category just for them now). On this video we are going to talk about the most important SEO factor: the Title Tag.

If you are using WordPress you can use this code to create an optimal title tag (just paste it in the header):

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ‘ - ‘ ; bloginfo(‘name’); } elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();} elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();} else { wp_title(‘’,true); } ?></title>

Here is a rough transcript of the video (the blog used for example was PublicRecordsGuy.com):

Hey guys, today we are going to talk about one of the most important search engine optmization factors: the Title Tag.

So what is the Title Tag? basically it is tag inserted in the head section of a web page that is used to tell both search engines and human visitors what the page is about

Search engines will get the information about the title tag on the source code of a web page, while human visitors will be able to see it on top of their browsers.

The title is so important for 2 reasons: first of all it is the part of your website that will have the greatest impact on your search engine rankings.

Secondly, given your search rankings, the title tag will also affect how many clicks you will end up getting because it is the text that search engines will use to display your pages

For example, you can see that the title tag on the homepage of Seobook.com is “learn, rank, dominate - seobook.com.”

And the title tag on the Seobook blog is only seobook.com.

Now if you go to Google and search “seo book” you will see that the headline for the homepage is the same as the title tag, “learn, rank, dominate, seobook.com.”

And the same thing for the blog section.

Now if we think about blogs, there are mainly 2 places that you should be worried about your title tag: the homepage and the single post pages.

That is because the majority of your search engine traffic will go to those pages; secondary pages like categories or archives usually do not rank well for competitive terms.

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So what should you include in your title tag? Keep in mind that an optimal title tag should:

-be unique to each page of your website
-include the main keywords of each page
-be concise
-and should appeal to humans as well

On the homepage, therefore, you should use a title tag that includes the main keywords of your blog, and that describes your content and your brand.

If you are not targeting any particular keywords with your website as a whole, you could leave just its name on the title tag for the homepage.

If you are targeting specific keywords it would be a good idea to place them first in the title tag because they will receive more value that way.

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On the single post pages, on the other hand, it would be a good to make your title tag dynamic, so that it will reflect the headline of your post.

One common mistake that bloggers make is to include the name of their blog on the title tag of single post pages as well

If you check this blog, for instance, you will see that the title tag on the homepage is looking good, but on the single post page, apart from the headline of the post, you also have the name of the blog.

Why is this a mistake? because the name of the blog will almost never be relevant to the topic of the single posts, and by including it on the title tag you are adding irrelevant keywords and diluting the value of the relevant ones.

To illustrate the problem, lets suppose that a search engine gives an algorithmic value of 100 to the title tag of every website.

As you can see the main keywords of this post are “bernie,” “ward,” “changes” and “plea.”

if you use as title tag the same headline of the post, each keyword will receive an individual value of 25.

If, instead, you add the name of the blog to the title tag, you will be adding irrelevant keywords and the value of the main keywords will be dilluted to 14.3

As a result of this value dilution it would be harder to rank well when someone searches for “bernie ward changes plea” or something related to it, which is the main topic of the post.

So that is it. I hope the example made it easier to understand title tags and how to make them more efficient on your blog.