In the first part of this series, I gave a broad overview of some of the things you can do to improve your on-page and off-page (often referred to as on-site and off-site) SEO. I overlooked a number of items, but I will proceed to go over these different aspects of SEO in this article and the following ones.

The first thing to focus on is your page title. I only alluded to this in Part 1, but for search engines there is no such thing as ‘Website Ranking’, it is very specifically ‘Web Page Ranking’ and it can rank well or poorly depending on its content and link. For this reason, each page of your site have to have a different title.

Reason #1

Search engines hate duplicate content. Your goal is to demonstrate your value to your users by leading them to unique and relevant content on the Internet. If they find duplicate content, they reduce the value of that content as it can be found elsewhere.

Reason #2

After the domain name/URL, the title of the page is the first thing search engines see, and they give it a lot of importance. The words you use in your title should match the terms that people commonly search for, and in that order if possible. It is also important to consider the proximity of the search term. The closer your terms are to each other, the more search engines will consider them as one phrase and weight them together. Try to avoid adding too many words like the, and, or, that, etc.to your title.

A bad title: Bad credit and how to get a low car loan

With this title, search engines will split Bad Credit and Auto Loan into two separate phrases and will be less likely to consider them together. Basically, this puts the site in competition with all the other sites that use bad credit Y car loan separately – a very large group. The combination of the phrases below will target them much more and reduce the competition.

A good title: Bad Credit Auto Loans: How to Get a Low Rate

Don’t worry about the s in Loans, the search engines (at least the main ones) are very good at handling plurals.

Reason #3

It is very unfortunate, but this is the one aspect that many SEO professionals do not take into account as they should. I put it as #3, but I honestly think it’s the most important. That’s how readable it is to humans. This is a fatal flaw of much SEO. So much emphasis has been placed on generating traffic that the visitors themselves are often overlooked. Everything you do, everything on your site, will be seen and judged by visitors (well, probably not your privacy policy or terms of service; at best, they’ll probably get a cursory glance). The page title is what appears as the title in search results. It is the first make or break decision point that your content presents to a potential visitor. If they aren’t hooked by your title, or feel like it’s totally irrelevant, then their eyes slide to the next list. There’s no point getting to page one of Google’s results if your title doesn’t make sense to humans and they never click on it.

I sincerely hope that this information has been useful and informative for you. Feel free to contact me for any advice or clarification on creating great titles.