Bill Fergusson

M Posted 10 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

Recently, a respected industry columnist who had just interviewed John Mueller of Google and concluded that the title tag is severely over-rated as a ranking factor. Mueller's point was that a good page can rank without a title tag, but a perfect title tag will not have an impact if the content on the page is lacking.

The title tag, your content's intro, is likely not as important as some SEO's believe it to be. Rest assured that title tag SEO remains an essential elements of on-page optimization and becoming an SEO expert. Doing a good job with your tag is essential to ranking and getting traffic.

There was a time that Google would just truncate a long and unwieldy tag. Now, if you do a poor job of creating the title tag or make it too long, you may experience machine learning and artificial intelligence first hand: Google may swap in your URL or other text from the page on its SERPs.

What is the SEO title tag?

As you remember, the title tag appears in the header section of a page’s source code and is set off by html tags as in the following example: <title>Content Performance Marketing and SEO Blog | BrightEdge</title> While this tag is not visible on your HTML page, it appears in the first line of the organic search listing as shown below:

Four simple rules for writing a title tag

The search engines rely on the html title tag to understand the content that appears on the page, and it’s important for humans too as we’ll see below. So, that leads us to the first of four rules for creating a dynamite title tag:

• Perform keyword research
• Keep the title 55 characters or less
• Think of the title tag as an advertising headline
• Make every title tag unique.

1. Perform keyword research. Populate your tag with a keyword or keywords that accurately summarize the content on the accompanying page. In the tag above there are actually two relevant keywords – “Content Performance Marketing” and “SEO.” The keywords should appear to the left of the title tag if at all possible with the company name to the right if there is room. By the way, that vertical element to the left of the company name is called a “pipe” and is commonly used today to set off your company name. Don’t know which keywords to pick? Use the BrightEdge Data Cube to find dozens, hundreds or even thousands of keywords relevant to your topic. You’ll see search volume for each keyword, and quickly get a sense of how much competition there is around each. Don’t try to stuff keywords into your title tag. Instead create a tag that is easy for the human viewer to read.
2. Keep the title tag to 55 characters or less. As you can see in the example above, there is a limited amount of space on the search engine results page to display your tag. If you have a lot of “M’s” and not many “I’s” in your tag, that could run out of space, but usually you’ll be fine if you keep your html tag to about 55 characters. We have been seeing good results on pages with tags shorter than 30.
3. Think of the title tag as an advertising headline. Remember you’re writing the tag not just for the search engine, but for the human viewer as well. You want a title tag with stopping power - what keyword or short phrase could you put there to get the reader’s eye to stop? Then write a meta description that gives the reader a reason to click through to your content. Something like – “See our great selection of…” or, a common ending for meta descriptions among ecommerce sites today, “Free Shipping.” Look at the Recommendations module in the BrightEdge platform to see what your page’s Top Ten competitors are doing for the title tag and meta description. Maybe you can borrow a good idea from one of them or come up with something better than any of them. Remember - a click is an instantaneous reaction; you want to give people a reason to click almost instinctively to check out your content.
4. Make every title tag unique. Too often websites show the same html title tag for more than one page. The BrightEdge Recommendations Engine considers this a Severe error because duplicate tags keep the search engines from properly indexing and consistently serving up your organic listing when a search is launched. The best case scenario if you have duplicate tags is that the search engines may cannibalize your traffic by sending some to one URL with the duplicate title tag while sending other searchers to your other page(s) with the same title tag. As a publisher, you need to take control and direct traffic on one topic to the one URL that best serves your strategy. Today duplicate tags are frequently seen with smaller sites, perhaps because designers and smaller publishers are still learning how to do SEO management (learn what is SEO here). But this mistake can happen to larger sites as well. Check the Recommendation Summary Report in the BrightEdge Recommendations module every week and immediately fix any duplicate title tags that the BrightEdge Recommendations Engine identifies.

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Five quick steps to SEO title tag success

1. Before you write any actual content for the page, write the title tag and the meta description. It’s fine to use the same primary keyword in both. Again, the title tag as the stopper and the meta description is the teaser that is going to get the reader to click through to your content.
2. Create content for your page that is well-written, high quality, and hopefully different in approach than anything else that’s on the web today. You have to create unique content and execute well to get good organic rank, and, most importantly, click-throughs to your content.
3. After the page content is finalized, revisit your tag and meta description to ensure that there is still a match between the two and the content on your page. Remember, if the html title tag and meta description don’t accurately describe the content on the page, your chances of ranking are slim to none. If there isn’t a match with your finished content, re-write both tags.
4. After the page is published, check the SERP to make sure that your organic listing is displaying properly. Amazingly, many publishers forget this step. If your organic listing is not being displayed as you want, change your tags immediately. And check the Recommendation Summary Report every week for anything you missed!
5. After a few weeks have passed, check your page’s traffic with BrightEdge Page Reporting and click through rate on Google Search Console. If you’re not happy with the result, adjust the title tag and meta description. It will just take a few minutes of your time to research, write and publish. Go back to the Recommendations section in the BrightEdge platform and check out what your competition is doing if you need more ideas.

Too often we forget that we need to constantly optimize our own tags and content. As Avinash Kaushik, the evangelist of Google Analytics, says, the great thing about the web is that it allows you to fail fast and at low cost. Spend a few more minutes optimizing your tags to make sure you get the highest possible return on the money and time you have invested in creating great content.

Follow these four simple rules and five quick steps for your title tag SEO, and your traffic numbers will rock. And keep optimizing. In light of recent changes to how Google displays its SERPs, having descriptive keyword-optimized title tags for your content will be more important than ever. Find out why in our research report below.

How is your SEO? Test your SEO skills in minutes with the SEO Traveler and SEO Explorer quizzes. 

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 10 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

On November 20, 2015, Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land reported on the Internet chatter that discussed a Google update that began about the 19th. Mostly depending upon how their own rankings were impacted by the Phantom 3 update, SEOs and website owners expressed either positive or negative feedback about the changes. Some early feedback attributed ranking gains to improvements that either made sites more mobile friendly or improved content; however, just as many posters complained about better rankings for competitors' sites with low-quality backlink profiles.

The forum and social media chatter alerted Mr. Schwartz to possible updates, but he didn't only rely upon these opinions for confirmation of an update. He also published charts from Algaroo, and other SERP trackers to demonstrate a recent increase in rank volatility. This suggested that something changed, but nobody from Google had explained or even confirmed any updates.

What is the Phantom 3 update?

Was the update real, a change to Penguin or Panda, or a difference in Google's core algorithm? John Mueller, Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst, had already sent out a response to a question on Twitter on the 19th. He Tweeted that he had nothing significant to report and any changes noticed were likely to simply be one of hundreds of minor updates that the search engine giant makes each year. By the 20th, Mr. Mueller clarified his response by indicating that there had been an update to Google's core algorithm. By the beginning of December, search engine bloggers had named this update Phantom 3. To explain the name, Schwartz mentioned that two surprise updates in 2015 had been called Phantom 1 and 2. Later, according to a second Search Engine Land post on the update, Google confirmed that Phantom 2 had occurred in May, and they called it a quality update. Schwartz concluded that Phantom 3 was probably another update for quality, but he had no confirmation of that from Google.

Provocative updates to mobile navigational searches from Phantom 3

Obviously, Google had rolled out an update. The exact nature of the update was still unknown. While evidence and some confirmation pointed to one of many core updates that the search engine company rolls out each year, Google never published any specifics. If this was all there was to it, interest might have faded. However, it only became more complex when navigational searches on mobile devices became an issue. A navigational search is when a user searches for a website or page without directly typing in the URL. A relevant example of this might be typing "Tripadvisor hotels" in the search box instead of just navigating directly to TripAdvisor.com. It makes sense that some search users might rely upon these navigational searches more on mobile devices because it's more difficult to type an entire page addresses on small devices. Also, mobile bookmarks may not be as accessible as they are on laptops and desktops. It's worth noting that a search engine company would benefit from navigational searches. They get a chance to display some advertising for these searches, and they can't do that when Internet users simply access websites directly.

Google's OneBox topped navigational searches for local search competitors

One would expect to have a high- authority website returned to the top of the page as the result of a navigational search. Google has constantly stated that they strive to focus on user intent, and it seems fairly intuitive to surmise that has to be the user's intent. However, Mark Bergman reported on RE/Code that isn't what was happening after the November 19th update. In fact, the CEO of TripAdvisor complained about the update on Twitter on November 22. He gave an example that searches for "Tripadvisor HIlton" only returned the site's search entry so far down in the results that it couldn't be seen. Many navigational searches for Yelp pages produced similar results.

Executives from these companies weren't only provoked because their own company websites had moved down in the search results. Google had replaced the links for these authority sites with the large display for their own OneBox listings. Besides Yelp and TripAdvisor, FourSquare and ZocDoc also lost rankings to Google's own entries. For some background on this issue, both TripAdvisor and Yelp are participating in an EU lawsuit against Google for behaving in a way that they say stifles competition. The complaint alleges that the search engine company promotes its own products and does not provide unbiased search results when it runs counter to their own interests. Re/Code mentioned that the FTC published documents from Google's own internal communications about the Google algorithm's use of co-occurrence signals. These signals would display the search engine's own products when the regular algorithm would normally display a competitor's websites.

The concern about this update is that it appears to be a fairly blatant example of those co-occurrence signals in actual production use. Using a OneBox listing is far different than simply inserting a couple of obvious ads over the organic search results. A spokeswoman from Google quickly reported the issue as a simple bug and promised a prompt fix. Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO of Yelp, discounted the explanation and called it a behavior pattern and not a glitch. Kaufer of TripAdvisor echoed those sentiments. Regardless of the discussion, Google did roll out a "fix" the next day, and mobile, local searches returned to normal. Re/Code published an update that their own test searches confirmed that Google had remediated the problem.

Was the mobile search update a bug, a test, or a message?

Was it a bug? CEOs from impacted companies still contend that it wasn't a mistake. At the same time, Google maintains that it was. People who really believe in conspiracy theories might contend that it was not a simple glitch or a greedy manipulation in search results for some holiday shopping traffic. Instead, it might have been the search engine company's way of letting their competitors, the public, and maybe even the government see what they could do if they really wanted to manipulate search results.

Phantom 3 appears to be a quality update

Later in December, SEMRush published the results of their traffic analysis for general website searches for the Phantom 3 November 19th update. They concluded that Phantom 3 was both real and significant. Forty percent of the sites they tracked gained or lost traffic by at least 10 percent. They concluded that it was, indeed, a quality update and that sites that suffered losses had issues with duplicate or low-quality content. Website owners of any sites that lost positions should analyze their own pages for content issues. A BrightEdge Site Audit can help uncover problems and protect sites from possible traffic losses from future quality and algo updates.  

Sources

Was there a Google update this week around 19th November? Evidence of an unconfirmed Google update happening on November 19th Google says local search result that buried rivals Yelp and TripAdvisor is just a bug Was Google's new Phantom 3 update real? BrightEdge Site Audit - Assess your website and take action