Tool to Test Page Titles for Best Search Engine Results
30 July 2010
Arguable one of the most important factors in SEO success is your page title tag. Fixing your page title tags can often result in noticeable measured success.
How to fix your page title tags
First and foremost, you need to strategize a plan for your website and pages that encapsulate your end goal.
- What message are you trying to convey with your website?
- What is the theme of your website?
Once you have this figured out, take the next step and figure out the theme of each of your pages. If you have a large site, this can be overwhelming, but necessary and can be done on a larger scale with appropriate tools and development. We can discuss this type of solution on another day or you can contact us for more information.
A page title is made up of a unique set of keywords that tell the story of a particular page in one sentence. To get a better understanding of this, lets go all the way back to elementary school. You have just finished reading a short story to your teacher. “Good reading!” she says. And then she asks the question some of us hated to answer, “Now, what is the main idea of the story?” And then in later years, you would write a report and have to come up with a main idea, then the story. This is what the page title is, it's the main idea of a web page.
What if all the students in the class were assigned to give a report to which the teacher assign each student a different book, but on the same topic. At the end of the assignment, every student turned in their report with the same main idea at the top of the page. What would the teacher think?
In our case the teacher is Google and Mrs. Google doesn't like to see all of the page titles exactly the same. So, we have to be creative when submitting our reports/pages to Google in order to receive a good grade.
I recently had a client send me a spreadsheet of several page titles for each page. The page titles met the recommended length, less than 70 characters, but weren't very unique. The client obviously spent a lot of time on their work and there was a sense of pride in making steps to creating this spreadsheet for his newly created website. I had to be careful in the way I communicated that the page titles just aren't going to cut it. So rather than putting myself in teacher/student role, I created a tool that allowed them to see the numbers and proof that the titles were "not going to cut it." The tool showed them that most of their titles were 94% similar. I then re-worked the titles getting them to 40%. It all worked out in the end.
Feel free to use this tool to help you create page titles, give accurate numbers for discussions, and/or to fix your existing website for success.