The Title Tag : An Rare SEO Question Answered

The SEO ‘ed Title Tag : Regarding Symbols and HTML Coding Elements …

One of our customers asked us the other day, “How detrimental is it to have a
tag showing up in my page’s title?”

The answer to this question isn’t currently out there on the web, so for all you visitors who landed here by way of an seo title tag related query… welcome!

The history is this: Customer x came to us with an existing e-commerce site she needed optimized. Because her platform doesn’t allow for extensive content management capabilities, all names of products on product level pages become the page title by default.

(Side Note / Hint: When shopping for an ecommerce platform or cms system, make sure the product allows for customization of important SEO elements like page titles, meta data, and URLS)

Because this customer wanted to add the size and color below the the actual name, she needed to input a ”
“tag in the editing feild. This tag then of course showed up in the page’s title.

Do the search engines mind html tags in page titles? Does it effect SEO? The quick answer is no. It doesn’t help anything, as those precious character spaces should be reserved to house good SEO title tag text, encourage click throughs, and reinforce your brand.
People also often ask about the use of symbols in title tags. Keyboard symbols such as | & % $ # @ etc, are viewed as single characters, and are fine as long as they are separated by a space, ensuring your keyword phrases stand on their own rather than running together in one long non-word.
Of the symbols driven by code, only a few are reflected in title tags the copyright symbol(©), the trademark symbol (™), and the registered trademark symbol (®) These are honored by Google, MSN, and Yahoo!alike.

• Use “&copy” or or “&# 8482″ for ©
• Use “& trade” or “&# 8482″ for ™
• Use “& reg” for ®

Use these without the quotes spaces!
Unique situations such as the one described above, that force html into the title tags will not present major problems. The only suggestion we have is to space the tag from the text (this is not required when coding html) so that, again, the keyword can stand on it’s own.

Other Important Factors for Title Tags:

- Accurately defines the page (someone who’s booked marked your site does not want to see a long train of keywords, right?)

- Ideally Matches Your H1 tag (if your designing your pages for the user and not the search engines, this should be in place by default)

- Re-inforces your brand (put your company name in the title tag. This is just basic advertising principle here.)

- Don’t be too over the top.

KEYWORD! – CLICK HERE – :: LOOK no further!! is not gonna cut it.

Check out our favorite blog for another great post about SEO title tags at SEOMoz
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