How to write a great Title Tag for SEO

In this article, I will give you a few tips on how to formulate your title for best SEO results.

First, let me say there is no such thing as the perfect SEO title but we all aim towards perfections. We try our best 🙂

Preparation

It doesn’t matter if you have written your article or not yet, but I would recommend writing the whole article or blog post first so that you have all the nice keywords in your head and then work on your title.

I also recommend you to do a bit of research, in order to come up with the most suitable keywords for your title. For the purpose of this tutorial/guide, I will use food-related SEO title tips because it’s easier to explain as everyone understands food 🙂

So let’s say you are writing a recipe for a vegan pasta dish.  Do a Google search for vegan pasta dishes to see what others have done. See what Google suggests to get inspired.

Vegan as a word itself is too broad, so I suppose you will narrow it down by what kind of dish it will be. Is it pasta? Great! Then you can add an ingredient. Does it include broccoli? Mushrooms? Is it gluten-free pasta? Is it a lunch or a dinner recipe? These are things that you can use to narrow it down and help you get the clicks you want. The more specific you are the better.

Put all your important keywords together and compose the best title tag you can think of. Then go to Google to test drive it. Use that title you have written and see how does it perform on Google. What results do you get? Are they close to what your article is about? Then you are doing a great job. Get inspired and if you feel it is needed, follow their lead by editing your title to be similar to the top results.

I did the following test. I searched for:

1. Vegan gluten-free pasta dish for lunch, and
2. Vegan gluten-free pasta recipe

Here is what I got for search no 1:

And this is the results for search no 2:

Personally, I was more happy with the 2nd search results but I suppose it’s all a matter of what your article is about.

From the above experiment, you get to see what the titles of the top players are. Of course, the title itself is not the only ranking factor but it is definitely an important one.

My rule of thumb for a good title tag

I try to follow this rule which is not my own, but it’s pretty much the “industry’s standard” if one can say so.

I tend to use the keyword or keyword phrase first and then add my website’s name, or brand name. There are others that do the opposite and with great results but, personally, I think it works better to have the focus keyword at the beginning of the sentence. The reason is simply that when we are searching we tend to scan the results instead of reading and so for me it feels it’s faster to make the decision to click on somewhere that can I see on the first nanosecond what this is about.

It’s also a matter of what works best for your company so you can do a split test of both formats:

1. keywords/brand name
2. brand name/ keywords

and see what works best. If you have a strong brand name then I suppose option 2 can give you great results as well.

Pro tip:

If you are using WordPress consider installing the Yoast SEO plugin. I’m not affiliated or anything, but it’s a nice free plugin (it has a premium version as well) that offers nice tools and it gives you tips and guidelines on how to write better meta tags.

Final thoughts

The perfect SEO title is what the market decides not what we like. Fancy titles with word games and click baits do not work well, so always think like a customer and what they would search for.

Thank you for reading it and I hope it was helpful to you. Feel free to share it 🙂

See you next time.