All About Title Tags

What Is a Title Tag?

The title tag has been – and probably will always be – one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings.

In fact, fixing just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings. And because the words in the title tag are what appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP), changing them may result in more clickthroughs.

Search Engines and Title Tags

Title tags are definitely one of the "big three" as far as the algorithmic weight given to them by search engines; they are equally as important as your visible text copy and the links pointing to your pages – perhaps even more so. Yet, even though this has been common knowledge among SEO professionals for at least 10 years, it is often overlooked by webmasters and others attempting to optimize their websites for targeted search engine traffic.

Do Company Names Belong in the Title Tag?

The answer is a resounding YES! I've found that it's fine to place your company name in the title, and (gasp!) even to place it at the beginning of the tag! In fact, if your company is already a well-known brand, I'd say it's essential. Even if you're not a well-known brand yet, chances are you'd like to be, right? The title tag gives you a great opportunity to further this cause.

This doesn't mean that you should put *just* your company name in the title tag. Even the best-known brands will benefit from a few good descriptive phrases added, because they will enhance your brand as well as your search engine traffic. The people who already know your company and seek it out by name will be able to find you in the engines, and so will those who have never heard of you but seek the products or services you sell.

Title Tags Should Contain Specific Keyword Phrases

For example, if your company is "Johnson and Smith Inc.," a tax accounting firm in Texas, you would want your company's site to appear in the search engine results for searches on phrases such as "Texas tax accountants" and "CPAs in Texas." (Be sure to do your keyword research to find the best phrases!) If you prefer to work with people only in the Dallas area, you'd need to be even more specific by adding geographical modifiers to your title tags, such as "Dallas tax accountants."

Using our Dallas accountant example, you might create a title tag like this one:

Johnson and Smith Tax Accountants in Dallas

or you might try:

Johnson and Smith - Dallas CPAs

However, there's more than enough space in the title tag to include both of these important keyword phrases. I find that using 10 to 12 words in my title tags works great.

One way to include two keyphrases would be like this:

I've always liked the method of separating phrases with a hyphen; however, in today's competitive marketplace, how your listing appears in the SERPs is a crucial aspect of your SEO campaign. After all, if you have high search engine rankings but your targeted buyers aren't clicking through, it won't do you much good.

The idea is to write compelling titles as opposed to simply factual ones, when you can. But it also depends on the page, the type of business, the targeted keyword phrases, and many other factors. There's nothing wrong with the title tag in my above example. If you were looking for a tax accountant in Dallas and saw that listing at Google, you'd probably click it. (Note: Don't worry if some of your visible title tag info gets cut off when the search engines display your page's info; they are still indexing all the words contained within it.)

Still, you could make it a readable sentence like this:
I'm not as thrilled with that one. I had to remove the exact phrase "Dallas Tax Accountants" because it wouldn't read as well if it said:
It sounds redundant that way, as if it were written only for the search engines.

In the end, it’s really a personal preference.

Don't make yourself crazy trying to create the perfect title tag, because there's just no such thing. Most likely, either of my examples would work fine. The best thing to do is to test different ones and see which bring the most traffic to your website. You might very well find that the second version doesn't rank as well, but gets clicked on more, effectively making up the difference.

Use Your Visible Text Copy as Your Guide

I prefer to create my title tags *after* the copy on the page has been written and optimized. I need to see how the copywriter integrated the keyword phrases into the content to know where to begin. If you've done a good job with your writing (or better yet, hired a professional SEO copywriter), you should find all the information you need right there on your page. Simply choose the most relevant keyword phrases that the copy was based on, and write a compelling title tag accordingly. If you can't seem to get a handle on the most important phrases for any given page, you probably need to rewrite the page content.

I recommend that you *don't* use an exact sentence pulled from your copy as your title tag. And don't use the exact wording that's in your top headline. It's much better to have a unique sentence or a compelling string of words in your title tag.

You'll want to watch out for certain website content management systems (CMS) and blog software that automatically generate the title tag from information you provided elsewhere. Some, in fact, default to the same exact title tag on every page, which is the best way to kill your search engine leads! The good news is that most of today's CMS's and blog software have workarounds so that you can customize your title tags fairly easily. If yours doesn't, or your developer claims they can't do this, then you'll want to find a new developer or CMS as soon as possible!

A Logo Without Your Name... Can Be A Big Branding Pain!

I often get asked to develop a small business's logo as a symbol-only logo. But for many small businesses, this isn't the right choice for a couple of reasons:

Designing a symbol-only logo is a much more complicated (and often more expensive) process, because the symbol has to:

• Carry a lot more meaning — there's no text to help explain the business. It's important that your logo has some meaning and a role in explaining your business — and that's a lot for a little symbol to do all by itself.
• Be entirely unique all on its' own. I don't need to tell you that there are a whole lot of logos out there. A lot of the basic shapes — and even some of the more complicated ones — are already "owned" by big corporations. But you can still use variations or combinations of those shapes when they're designed into a logo with your company name.
• Communicate to your audience. The more obscure the symbol design that you create, the less likely that your customers will understand its meaning. Or they may interpret it incorrectly. Either way your clients will feel alienated — and that's never good.

If you do create a symbol-only logo, you'll have a couple of challenges with your brand identity:

• It will take a lot more time and effort to educate your target audience about your business. Think of all the symbol-only logos that are really memorable, like Nike or Apple. The reason that those are so memorable and well-known is that each of those companies has a very large advertising budget. They can afford to dedicate people and time to getting the word out. Their deep pockets build visibility and encourage recognition. Small businesses just don't have those kinds of resources.
• Trademark infringement can be more of a problem — from both sides of the fence. It can be very difficult for your designer to design a logo that won't look like any other trademarked logo out there, regardless how hard they try.
  • First of all, it's hard for a designer to comprehensively research all of the other trademarked logos just to see what you're up against. However, the Trademark Office has more thorough tools and methods of researching the other existing logos out there and they might find one that you overlooked.
  • Secondly, logos and trademarks can be a bit subjective. Just because you and your designer think that the design that you've created doesn't infringe on other logos, the Trademark Office might reject your application based on their interpretation of "similarity"
  • And you're not just worrying about what the Trademark Office thinks. Any other business with an existing trademark could also challenge your application. They can even ask you to cease-and-desist using your logo after it has been trademarked if they held their trademark to a similar logo first. While surrendering might not seem like such a bad thing, remember that you'd also have to destroy any existing printed collateral, forfeit your trademark (and the trademarking process isn't cheap!) and redesign all of your materials. You'll also lose the equity and memorability that you will have built up in your logo if you do have to redesign.
• If you do finally manage to design and trademark a symbol-only logo, you'll have to be extra-vigilant about making sure that other companies don't design a mark that's similar to yours. You are ultimately responsible for "policing" your own trademark and will have to stay up-to-date on trademark applications. Alternately, you could hire someone to keep an eye on new trademarks for you but that can be expensive.

You can easily avoid all of these complications by designing a combination logo that includes both a symbol and your company name. Once you've designed your combination logo, you should always use the components together. This helps avoid potential legal issues like those mentioned above.