What drives Internet traffic to your website? Is it your page title? Is it your meta title? Alternatively, is it something else altogether?
The Title Tag
When crawling a website, search engines factor in the content of your site’s title tag. Keep the title pithy and descriptive. This is not the time for a flight of fancy. Rather, choose a title that describes your business and incorporates your main search engine term. If you are in the business of selling work boots for men, simply name your page accordingly.
The Meta Title
As a business, you choose a meta title based on the most likely keyword searches that will bring visitors to individual pages of your website. If, for example, your website title is “Work Boots for Men,” your meta title for a page may say “Leather Work Boots for Men.”
Factoring in SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that Internet users can find your website by using keywords. You optimize your site to contain the keywords that computer users are most likely to type in, and Google – or other search engines – display your website among the search results. There is a chance that Google will alter the meta title if it comes across as being a bit too unwieldy.
Google will take bits and pieces of your meta title and display it in the search results. As a general rule of thumb, it is a good idea to only include the most important keyword in your meta title description and keep it short.
Seventy characters are more than enough. There is conflicting information about the importance of the meta title. Some Internet insiders argue that since Google changes it on the search engine results page, there is really no sense in doing a lot with it.
Others argue that it feeds Google the basics for its display information. If you want to have a bit of say over the results that Google displays, they say, it is a good idea to make your input known. We side with the latter. It does not hurt to add meta titles to your setup. So why not keep just a bit of control over this portion of your site’s appearance online?
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