What’s in a name? As anyone who has spent hours racking their brain for a good name for their products, services, or business can tell you – a lot. What we name something is supposed to encompass all of what it is – and that’s no easy feat.
Why are we waxing philosophical right now? Because title tags are names – names for the web pages of your Mississauga business. Your title tags are going to do a lot of heavy lifting – both telling people what your pages are, and convincing them to click on them.
What are title tags? How can your title tags help? Let’s find out.
What are title tags?
Title tags are a snippet of code found in the <head> of your HTML document. The title tag is simple:
<title>Your web page title here</title>
Title tags tell websites what to display as the title of your page. The title of your page will be a clickable link to the page itself, so if you want traffic, it’s important to have a good title tag.
The City of Mississauga has a great title tag for their home page:
Can’t get any simpler than that.
Your title tags will be a bit different. You’ll need to craft compelling copy in 60 characters or less.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s take a look at some title tag best practices first.
Title tag best practices
Websites have a tendency to cut off title tags that are too long. You also want every page to have a unique title tag to avoid confusing users. With that in mind:
- Keep your title tags below 60 characters
- Avoid using all caps or excessive caps in your title tag
- Where possible, match at least part of your title tag to the page’s H1
- Have a unique title tag for each unique page
- Make sure the title tag accurately describes the page
Optimizing title tags in Mississauga
The best practices we listed above tell you how to make acceptable title tags. To optimize them, you’ll need to keep a few other things in mind:
First, you should use keywords you want to rank for in your page’s title. That does NOT mean you should stuff keywords – limit the use of keywords in your title, and only use them if they’re relevant to the page.
It’s a good idea to include the word Mississauga in most of your title tags when you’re trying to improve your local rank. Fortunately, that’s pretty easy to do.
Imagine you own a spa, and you’re creating a title tag for your Swedish massage service page. We’ll call our spa MissisSPAuga, because we (and by we, I mean I) love cute puns. Your title page might look like this:
Swedish massage in Mississauga | MissisSPAuga Luxury Spa
We’ve done a lot with this title – we’ve included the service being provided, our location, our name, and what we do. Always try to frontload the most important keywords.
Where possible, keep some consistency throughout your title tags. For example, including | MissisSPAuga Luxury Spa at the end of all of our title tags might be a good idea for our MissisSPAuga brand.
Let First Rank handle your Mississauga title tags for you
Of course, going back through all of your web pages to create title tags can be a lot of effort. When you don’t create your own title tags, websites will auto-generate titles – usually from your H1.
Great title tags can seriously reduce bounce rates and increase the amount of traffic you get from social media and search engines. If you don’t have the time to create unique title tags for all of your pages, let First Rank handle it for you. When you get our Mississauga SEO service, we’ll include title tags for all of your pages.
Interested? Give us a call!
Jacob Kettner is the owner and CEO of First Rank Inc., a digital marketing agency based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He currently sits on Manitoba Chamber of Commerce Small Business Advisor Council which assists people grow their small businesses in Manitoba.
