Every webpage on the Internet has a title, whether it has been chosen by the webmaster or by the first few words on the page itself.
People usually overlook webpages’ titles as shown as the top of their browsers or in browser tabs. Yet a webpage’s title tag deserves recognition for its effort in improving onsite SEO.
The title tag is what search engines display in SERPs as the name of a webpage. That’s important because the title tag is often the first impression a search engine user has of your website. Optimizing title tags can be the difference between higher click-through rates (CTR) or searchers scrolling past a link.
Even better is the fact that editing a title tag is an easy SEO fix. By doing the following, you can make your first impression your best impression.
4 Simple Steps to a Title Tag That Increases CTR
1. Know the best format to use for title tag copy. Use descriptive primary and secondary keywords, for which your business aims to rank highly, in the beginning of the title tag.
For example, an online accounting software company targeting small businesses could write their website’s title tag as
Small business accounting – online software | [Company Name]
If the brand is well known it’s okay to place the company’s name first, followed by the primary and secondary keywords as so
[Company Name] | Small business accounting – online software
2. Make the title tag relevant to your targeted audience. If you adhere to Step 1’s suggestion, this should be a no-brainer. With the help of keyphrase research, select words that relate most to your ideal customer.
3. Be honest in your title tag. There’s nothing worse than clicking on a link because the title matches exactly what you’ve been looking for, only to get to the webpage and find you’ve been misled. That kind of underhanded behavior leads to high bounce rates. The deception just isn’t worth the time it takes.
4. Keep the title tag within an ideal 70 or fewer characters. Any longer and search engines will replace the tail end of your title tag with an ellipsis (…).
It may seem like a nonfactor, but an optimized title tag is one of the quickest ways to make your website more susceptible to increased web traffic. Along with other white hat SEO practices, it contributes to a boosted search engine ranking.