No matter how many times we remind ourselves that writing really good title tags for our web pages is essential, it’s the easiest thing in the world to forget to do so. An easy trap to fall into is to just let a content management system take the page headline and dump it into the title tag field. Perhaps it may have been set up by the original website designer to add the company name for good measure. So while a headline like “ABC123 Blue Widget” on a product page might be perfectly adequate within the context of the site, having a subsequent auto-generated title tag of “ABC123 Blue Widget | The Blue Widget Co” is not good enough. Having this appear in the Google results will let you down, especially if you want the page to rank for a specific search such as “fast blue widgets”. Not only will Google not get the message, but when they see it in the results, nor will your prospects.
Any decent content management system will let you write the title tag separately from everything else, so take advantage of that. Indeed, as I’ve said before, a regular audit of all the titles on your site is a very useful exercise. Compare the content of the titles with what the page is appearing for in searches, using Google Search Console, and see if you can tie in the title tag more closely to the popular searches. If any clients want a list of all the pages on your site with the titles, just ask.
Tomorrow I’ll take a look at some tips on how to write great title tags.