The use of title tags in SEO strategy has been around for a quite some time. Many people acknowledge that they are a very important aspect of on page optimization. Once their level of importance is understood people usually want to “optimize” them with “keywords”. Most end up increasing the length of their title tags to encompass multiple locations and phrases assuming this will send more traffic to their website. This is their first mistake because they haven’t done any research or even analyzed their current title tags.
Title Tag Research
This is one of the most important parts of re-writing your title tags. In fact, it is probably the most important part of any updates to meta information. Just like many other situations in life it is always important to get a feel for what you are getting yourself into. Searching around for title tag best practices is a great start. One of the first things you will find is that there is a lot of concern about title tags being too long and irrelevant. Read different blog posts and read what people have tried in the past. You will quickly find out that many suggest to keep your title tags under 70 characters. This includes spaces as well as dashes and pipes. If you happened to come across a more recent post you will see Google cut most of them off between 60 and 64 characters.
Analyzing Your Current Title Tags
Go through a large majority of your title tags. You can do this by going to Google and putting in “site:autodealershipmarketing.com” (replacing autodealershipmarketing.com with the website you would like to test). This allows you to see how your title tags and meta descriptions will show when returned in the SERPs. Now that you can actually see what is being represented in the search engines you realize how much wasted space there is. Go through several pages in the search results and make note of different sections involved in the title tag. You will see that many of them tend to be quite similar (even exact duplicates are likely on an un-tamed website or blog).
Rewrite Your Title Tags
After you have analyzed your current title tags we can finally start getting our hands dirty. You’ll want to open up the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This will help you compare keywords that you are using to see how much traffic they receive. Try different combinations of words in different orders to see how they compare. You can then determine which of them are the most important. Now you will want to pull up the place were you edit your title tag(s). Read over it multiple times so you know every word that is being used. Go through and remove all filler words such as “a” “and” as well as commas. Your next step should be to remove all other keywords that ranked lower when doing your keyword research and put in your top keyword phrase. By following these steps your title tags should be much shorter.
Second Thoughts
If you are having second thoughts on removing keywords from your title tags you should not worry. Through your keyword research you discover some words are searched more than others. Maybe you ran into two keywords or keyword phrases that were really close. This is where some don’t want to think of an alternative and just include both which makes for a less targeted title tag. A solution to this would be to use the second keyword or phrase on its own page. If you are planning on going through every single title tag on your website you probably want to make a list of the keywords you have removed as well as new ones you found while using the keyword research tool. This will allow you to create new content on your website/blog.
Why Shortening Title Tags is Important
Throughout time search engine scientists have discovered that having longer title tags reduces their effectiveness. The longer the title tag is the less powerful and relevant it becomes. Having a short title tag that gets to the point usually makes them less confusing to a potential customer that comes across them as well.