About a minute into the video below Eli Paris explains how he asked two of his friends to input the keyword “Egypt” into Google and had them both take screenshots of the search results page. You may be surprised to learn that they both received different search results. This is because Google is starting to tailor search results to the individual. The million dollar question is how this effects search engine optimization if it effects it at all.
This news comes at no surprise really. I’ve known for a few years now that Google will rank sites higher in your individual search results if you “liked” that site on Stumbleupon.
Originally, my title tag for each page was something like this “TRUE (Website Name) >> Blog Category >> (Post Title)“.
This is not ideal for a couple reasons:
1. Your “post title” is what catches the interest of a potential reader when your site shows up in the search engines and if your “post title” is not near the beginning of your title tag then it’s not likely people will click on your site listing.
2. Search engines place more importance on keywords found near the beginning of your title tag.
For this reason, you want your title tags to be situated more like this:
“(Post Title) – (Website Name)”:
Title Tag Example - Click to enlarge
You can do this in WordPress by heading to Appearance > Editor and clicking on Header.php. There you will find the title tags.
Click To Enlarge
Copy and paste the following inbetween the title tags (see image):
<?php wp_title(”); ?>
After that just save your changes and you should be good to go.
Write For The Visitor, Not The Search Engines
Remember though that when writing your post titles (that then later become your title tags) you want to write to the visitor first and foremost. Don’t write content that appeals exclusively to the search engines. This is usually the biggest mistake most beginners make. Read my post Search Engine Marketing Simplified to understand where I’m coming from. Remember, just focus on appealing to humans, and the rest will take care of itself.
Check out these sweet title tag tips from SeoBook:
“Tips on Page Titles
Google shows the first 60 to 70 characters in the search results. Make sure your important keywords occur early in the page title for scan-ability. If your title goes beyond 70 characters Google may cut off the title before 69 characters and display … at the end of your page title.
Rather than making your page title just the keyword and/or starting your page title with the keyword, sometimes it helps to add in a descriptive modifier before your core keyword. This helps ensure your page is less likely to get filtered out of the search results (and thus makes your rankings more stable) while helping you rank for additional terms.
Page titles are used to draw in clicks from search results amongst many anonymous competing offers, thus they present an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition and qualify prospects to your offer.
Good titles evoke an emotional response, ask a question, or promise something (that the landing page fulfills).
Since the page title is one of the few elements search engines can show searchers before sending them to your site, they place significant weight on the words in the page title. In addition, some people link to pages using their official page title as the link anchor text.
