Use your page titles to increase traffic

Hopefully one of the aims of any website is to get a decent ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To achieve this to need to provide the search engines with something to index. And the very first thing a search engine look for is the page title. The page title should describe the content of the page: if you are selling widgets then the title needs to word widget in it. Sounds obvious but many sites fail this simple test.

But there’s more, if the widget is blue then you need ‘blue widgets’. If you offer free delivery then you need ‘free delivery for all blue widgets’. Some people advocate the inclusion of the company name, I don’t for the simple reason that people don’t care who you are, all they want is a widget.

Targeting the search engines

The page title will always appear in the results of a search. It follows that it’s the first thing visitors will see when they use a search engine to look for something. So you need to make sure that the page title attracts their attention, instead of a having just a couple of words, make a sales pitch. For example:

Go from this: cushion covers.

To this: handmade silk-screen printed cushion covers.

You are now fully describing the product which will hopefully pick up people searching for:

• cushion covers
• handmade cushions
• silk-screen printing
• printed cushion covers

and so on.

Remember as well that the search engines only display about 60 characters in the snippet so if you make is too long then the last bit will will get chopped off.

I could go on but this excellent article on page titles from SEO logic does the job far better than me.

But don’t think that writing stunning page titles is the end of the story, keyword placement is at the heart of a successful SEO campaign.