SEO 101 – Creating Unique Titles

The title of a web page is the first thing that a search engine looks at when it crawls your site. Search engines use titles and descriptions to list the websites in their search results as shown in the following image.

Because it is the first thing the search engines look at I consider it to be the most valuable real estate on your site. You must use it wisely. A title should summarize in 100 characters or less what that particular page is about.

This is where you will strategically place the key phrases you really want to rank for. Your main key phrase should come first. Not your business name or your domain name. Your secondary key phrases should immediately follow. The title should be written in this format:

<title>Main key phrase – Secondary Phrases | Your Business Name (if there is space for it)</title>

For example, the title of the home page of our example website that sells the guide to running a dry cleaning business might look something like this:

<title>Start A Dry Cleaning Business – How To Start A Dry Cleaners Franchise</title>

Now let’s examine why this title is effective. Obviously the first key phrase we put in the title was “Start a dry cleaning business”. This is the main term we are trying to rank for. The great part about this is that we are also targeting the term “dry cleaning business” at the same time. Search engines look at every word in the title individually so with that first phrase you are actually targeting two key terms.

The second part of the title is written similarly: “How to start a dry cleaners franchise”. We are targeting “how to start a dry cleaners franchise” as well as “start a dry cleaners franchise” and “dry cleaners franchise”. So by including that one phrase we target 3 more main terms.

I used the term “dry cleaners” purposely instead of “dry cleaning” in the second part of the title. The reason being is now we are also targeting all of the same terms as before but with the term cleaners instead of cleaning. So basically we doubled the amount of key phrases we are targeting in the title by doing it that way.

IMPORTANT: You should target different key phrases on every page of your site, thus every page should have its own unique title.