Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

As many good SEO’s out there know, your page title is one of the most important aspects of properly optimizing your page. So often, I see page title after page title completely identical to the previous one. “Product 1″, “Product 1″, “Product 1″, even though all three pages have different information - pricing, specifications, and where to buy, as an example.

Another problem arises when you have a deep information architecture with multiple levels. Say for example I have an auto parts store. I might navigate to a brand specific spark plugs page. Your hierarchy might look something like this: Car Place X > Auto Parts > Engine Parts > Spark Plugs > Rapid Fire Spark Plugs. That’s a lot to display in a page title, but not unbearable. The problem arises when you try and index this against Google, which limits the amount of characters in the page title to around 70-80 characters. You might end up with several pages all being indexed for the same page title, only due to truncation.

What you need to be sure of is that you move the most unique aspect of the page title to the front of the [title] tag. This will ensure that your most unique part of the title tag is indexed and is bold when displayed in search results. That’s really the most important point here. Google will always index everything in the page title, and even return results for it, however, you will get more clicks and therefore higher relevance if users see the term they searched for highlighted.

Picture of La Seo Cathedral courtesy of stewdawg7