At dental design, a core part of our business is search engine optimisation. However, when we speak to you about seo in your management update, do you really know what we’re doing to optimise your site and why? This post goes back to basics and explains title tags.
So what exactly is a title tag and why is it important for seo?
Title tags appear at the top of your html, in the <head> section. It’s useful to think of title tags as the title of a chapter in a book, letting customers and search engines know what your page is about. Title tags help people decide whether to visit your site from search engines and therefore should contain important keywords.
Title tags can be written in many ways, dependent on the individual seo’s practices, however as an example, this is how I would write a meta title tag:
Writing title tags | Search engine optimisation blog | Dental Design
I always put the title of the page first, as usually it contains the keywords for the page anyway. Next, I would include a key phrase/ key word and finally a location or branded keyword. The reason for this, is that search engines read from left to right giving more importance to keywords that are at the beginning of the tag.
Title tags also should be less than 70 characters in length, ideally 68 characters, as all of your title will then be shown on the search engine results page. It is also good practice to use piping | to separate your keywords rather than connective words such as: and, in, with etc.
It is very important not to be lazy and duplicate title tags on other pages, as google will penalise the page against your competitors.
The most important lesson to learn from this blog is relevancy, there is no point in keyword stuffing your title tag with words that do not relate to the page, as it will not rank highly. I find this a lot when dentists would like to rank for lots of locations outside of their area, which have no mention anywhere on the website itself, it simply isn’t seen as relevant to google.
If you would like more information about how we do seo for your website, feel free to contact your account manager for advice.