Optimizing Titles Tags for WordPress. Part 2: The Strength of Title Tags

The strength of the title tag for getting SEO results has been well-documented over the last decade or so and isn’t showing any signs of going away. It worked on static pages in the old days and it works on WordPress sites today. The title tag remains one of the strongest signals that can be sent to a search engine. SEO people often obsess over title tags because you can change them and literally sit back and watch the page move up or down in rankings.

Here’s an example from a popular third-party social media site BizSugar which as is typical with sites built on the Pligg platform allow users to submit a URL which and scrape the title tag which becomes part of the URL and Title of the submission. If someone submits your post and it makes the front page of BizSugar, you’re post gets a lot of visibility and a followed link with your title tag anchor text.

Another reason to get excited about title tags for organic search is for the purpose of inciting increased click-throughs from search results to the page on your site. Which one of these two titles would you click?

Get your Free iPhone | No Contract | Apple

Or:

iPhone Offer

What you put in your title tags will influence the behavior of visitors who have never heard of you or been to your site. Just as with a paid search headline, if your title tag both incites viewers to click and maintains fidelity with your landing page, you are on track to optimizing. Can you see the potential for title tags to increase sales or leads for your business?

Besides the benefit of getting more traffic, increased click-throughs from search engine results are thought to have some weight in ranking pages. Google has discussed the idea of measuring click-throughs in organic search in at least one previous patent. The idea is that high click-throughs signal that something good is on the other side and therefore should be rewarded with higher visibility in search engines results pages. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Title tags are such a powerful asset to your blog that you’ll want to test different ones frequently right? Wrong! You’ll want to optimize your titles early but NOT often. Why shouldn’t you change your title tags until you get the results you want? Each time you change a title, you’re inviting search engines to re-evaluate your page. If you’re changing a title tag every week, this will smell like trickery or spam. I recall one search marketing company even developed dynamic tag insertion software with adjustable variables for title, keywords, description, etc. This allowed them to log in remotely and change title tags with frequency. I don’t think this practice fared very well.