This month I want to start a new series looking at the 15 most important onsite SEO factors that can help determine where you rank with Google. Today I’m going to discuss the document title.

Document Title

The document title is the text located at the very top of your browser above the line where you see the url of the website. If you visit the Young Entrepreneur blog home page, for example at http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/blog/, the document title is YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog.

If you look at the HTML of a website, the document title is put between the tags .

The document title is the most important element that Google looks at in terms of onsite SEO factors. The reason why it is so important is because Google will look at the first 100 characters, or so, of your document title. This means you have 100 characters to describe what is on the page below so chances are the keywords you put in this description will be highly relevant to the content on the page.

Once you have found the keywords you want to optimize for (see: The Foolproof Way To Finding The Best Keywords For Your Site), make sure to put them in your title tag. The most important keywords should be at the front and then add the not as important ones in afterwards.

Some common mistakes to avoid are:

Don’t use standard document titles.

Many websites have a document title of “Home” or “Welcome” or generic ones like “index1″. Some of them are even left blank! The chances of you ranking in Google for a keyword like Welcome is going to be pretty rare so make sure to get your important keywords up in your document title! The best thing about it is that while a lot of SEO work goes against making a good looking page, as I’ll discuss in future posts, the title tag is not usually looked at by your viewing audience. This means that editing your title tag doesn’t take away from the user experience and it helps you gain ground in Google’s search engine.

Don’t put your company name in

Another common mistake is putting your company name in at the top of each title tag. Chances are you are going to rank for your company name anyway, especially if it’s in your domain name. For example, it would be hard for anybody to outrank youngentrepreneur.com for the keywords “young entrepreneur”. Instead of taking up valuable real estate for your company name, use that space to put in your keywords. If you have to put in your company name then put it at the far right of the title tag instead of at the beginning. Remember that the closer the keyword is to the left, the more importance it is given.

Use different titles for each page

Finally, you want to make sure that each page on your site has a different title tag. Many entrepreneurs end up using the exact same document title for all the urls on their domain. It’s important to remember that each page can rank independently of your home page so you want to optimize each one as much as possible. This starts with having a unique title tag for every page of content you have.
http://www.YoungEntrepreneur.com gets over 395,000 entrepreneurs coming to the site each month and only 46% go directly to the home page! The key to driving all that traffic is having well optimized subpages that Google can find so we don’t rely just on the home page.

Evan Carmichael

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

Did you enjoy this article? If so, then subscribe to our RSS Feed.