This post is the first in the series of Basic SEO guide for Beginners

The Basic SEO Guide starts off with optimizing Title Tags, as the single most important factor in on-page SEO is Page Titles. Goto google.com and search for something common, yet important. You would find that all of the results have the keywords present on the page titles.
The first time I optimized title tags was on my first blog, when I read it at a very popular SEO blog (I seriously don’t remember where.. else, I’d have linkyluvd) that a group of SEO experts had a camp and after some days of analysis, they came to the conclusion that title tags were the single most important element in SEO. I quickly adopted these words of wisdom into practice and soon enough, I found the results to be impressive.

A mistake that most casual bloggers make.

Watch out for this one. Say you have a blog named “My Gadgets Review Blog” and you make a post “Orange Commander 3G Phone User Review”. By default, most blogging systems would have a title tag for this post as
My Gadgets Review Blog >> Orange Commander 3G Phone User Review
If it was
Orange Commander 3G Phone User Review >> My Gadgets Review Blog
it would make a huge difference to search engines.
My personal opinion is that post titles should contain only the keyword rich title of the post and nothing else. Just the title “Orange Commander 3G Phone User Review” would do. Why unnecessarily add your blog title or the category and make the title tag longer and futile?

Implementing proper title tags

Since most of us use wordpress, we’ll concentrate on how to implement SE friendly Title Tags on a WP blog. Get an SEO plugin like All in One SEO pack or SEO Title Tag. I use AIO SEO Pack on almost all of my blogs. It is hassleless. Install, configure, activate and you’re done. No worries editing the theme and stuff.

Once installed, goto Options>All in one SEO from WP Admin and set the Page Title Format to the optimum %page_title%. You can also tweak other settings like Home page title, META Tags etc.

Making Effective Title tags

When creating a new blog post, use the title as usual. This is the title that the users see and how post titles would appear within your blog. Add an SE friendly and keyword rich title via the All in one SEO Pack from below the editor. Refer to the above example. Say you are making a new post on “Pink Lady Wordpress theme”. To the blog visitors, the title would be “Pink Lady wordpress theme”. But under AIO SEO’s title field, we have added the title as “Girlish teenager theme for a Wordpress personal blog”. This would be the title Search Engines see. Would a person searching for a cute new theme for her new blog search on google for “Pink Lady theme” or “girlish teenage wordpress theme”? You make the guess.

SEO Friendly Title Tag checklist

• Has keywords that best describes your article
• Not stuffed with nothing but keywords
• Not irrelevant to the content
• Makes sense to both humans and bots
• You have made it to be as unique as possible
• No superfluous information like Blog Name, “Untitled” etc. is attached
• Is not more than 70 characters in length (well.. um.. 65-70 chars)
• Blog Name should come at the end and NOT at the beginning (Its much better to avoid it in single posts’ titles)

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