One Small Trick To Make Your Title Tags More Effective
Rcently I was reading a study done on title tags that stated almost 61% of all title tags end up getting changed by Google’s search engine crawlers. The study went on to list a variety of ways that you can prevent your title tags from being changed and one of the more interesting methods I read was that using dashes between phrases in a title tag works far more effectively than pipes. In fact, pipes were eliminated 41% of the time compared to dashes at 19.7%.
For example
Landscaping services | Landscapers | Random Business Name
Should instead be written
Landscaping services – Landscapers – Random Business Name
I’d put the pipe before the name of the site.
Also, use like this for a Home page:
Site Name – Page Title
For other pages:
Page Title – Site Name
Then write the titles so that they are human-friendly:
Use dashes between the title headings. The crappy part to that is they use up more pixels then a pipe. More important than pipes or dashes though is subheadings
Google updated the title standards because google may return a passage from a page that answers a specific query. The page title may have little detail in it about that specific passage so they will change the title to something they feel is more appropriate. Enter the subheading. The subheading should be the ‘title’ of the passage that follows it. Optimize your subheading just as you would the page title, 60 characters etc…. Increase your chances of controlling the title if google chooses to us a passage from the page. If your subheading is appropriate, then google is more apt to use it. That means no more one or two word subheadings.
We have been updating all of our and already have been writing our subs as section titles for a couple of years. We write for people and the content dictates the subheadings instead of google but if we can influence what they do use, all the better. Google changes titles on these sites less than half as often.
I think dashes work instead of pipes. Real-time example. Google AdWords – Google Ads headings are separated by dashes only not with pipes 🙂
