If you’re an SEO junkie, you may visit SEOmoz often. If you don’t, you need to. In my opinion SEOmoz has the 2nd best SEO blog (Aaron Wall’s SEObook is my top choice). SEOmoz’s most important piece of content may be this excellent compilation, Search Engine Ranking Factors. In this compilation, SEOmoz gathered 37 of the most knowledgeable SEO experts. They surveyed the experts on the most important Google search engine factors. These were the experts’ top 10 factors.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

Here are some of comments regarding the top factor. I’ll go through 1-3 factors per blog post in the next couple of days.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag

I thought anchor text and backlinks would be more important. However, Keyword Use in Title Tag was by far the most important factor. It got a 4.9 out of 5. The closest other factors, Anchor Text of Inbound Link and Global Link Popularity of Site, only had a 4.4.

So, if there is something to check on your website, it’s the title tags. Do your have keywords with search volume in your title tags? If you don’t, it’s time to do some keyword research and fix your tags. If you have a site that’s already ranking for a couple of terms, adding keywords to your title tags will immediately bring you more search traffic.

How else can you take advantage of this factor? Right now, I’m doing an SEO internship for a company with a couple of websites. I may be offered a job if I meet certain traffic goals. Many of the pages on their sites do not have great title tags. This includes high PR pages. Starting with the high PR pages, I’m gonna optimize the title tags to bring more traffic.

Also, you can search around and buy a site with good PR and backlinks but crappy title tags. Most of the grunt work (aka link building!) has been done for you. All you have to do to increase traffic quickly is insert keywords in the site’s title tags.

With this factor being so important, I’m surprised that many webmasters don’t optimize their title tags. I think the reason for this is because keyword research can be tedious. I personally like doing keyword research, but for many webmasters keyword research is not an enjoyable task. If you don’t like keyword research, you could easily outsource it for cheap.

A couple more things. Don’t spam you title tag with keywords. That’s just cheesy. Google can easily detect that. Also, your titles will be less readable.

By adding keywords to your title tags, you’ll get more links from auto generated sites. I know those links don’t count for much, but it’s still a link.

Optimized title tags will get you more clicks on the SERPs. Why is this? Well, when anyone searches on Google, the search term they use is bolded. Bold text increases visibility and clicks.

What has been your experience with optimizing title tags?

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