When it comes to SEO there are very few things as important as a good page title. Like a good suit or a Rolex watch – it’s a timeless classic ?
In this post I’m going to explain what a page title is and where you find one, and then I’ll move on to explain WHY it’s so important to ensure it’s optimised for SEO.
This post was taken from an SEO audit I completed for https://www.essentialoilsguru.com/ over on our Facebook Group (make sure you join here if you haven’t already).
So what’s a page title?
Recognise this structure for websites in the search engines? This is where they use page titles.
A page title is a succinct and short description of a web page. It’s a bit like a how a book title summarises the contents of a book.
Know who else uses page titles? Web browsers. Have a look…
All web pages have a page title, even if you didn’t realise your site has them. And their primary use is for search engines to understand what a webpage is all about. So much so that they use this page title in their search results pages, and this is why they’re so important for SEO.
You want your page title to correctly summarise the contents of your webpage, and to entice your potential customers who are searching on Google.
How to SEO your page title
One SUPER important thing to remember about page titles is that you want to include your focus keyword, and ideally ‘frontload’ it.
What do I mean by that? So this website sells ‘Basil Essential Oils’, and if I go to the page for that product I see this as their title – “EO Sub Page – Basil Essential Oil – Essential Oils Guru”.
Now, the first part of this page title – “EO Sub Page” – is completely unneeded! Not only does it not make ANY sense to the customer, it pushes the good bit (the keyword “Basil Essential Oils”) further down towards the end of the title.
You want your title to just be “Basil Essential Oil – Essential Oils Guru” – much cleaner and simpler, and with your focus keyword right at the very front.
Rinse + repeat
By removing unnecessary copy, you’ll significantly help your SEO traffic across ALL of your website pages.
And remember – if you have lots of pages then these incremental improvements all add up to a big impact.
Review other pages across the site… are there other page titles with unnecessary copy? Are your keywords optimally placed? It’s really simple but it can have a really big impact on your organic traffic.
SEO is a game of 1% marginal gains. (If you’re unaware of this concept read this post by James Clear, it’s all about how a UK-based cycling coach called Dave Brailsford used small, incremental improvements to help his riders win the Tour De France – it’s a great analogy for SEO performance too.)
Hope this helps!
