July 2023 | Digital8

How to Optimize Your WordPress Site’s Title and Meta Tags for SEO

Importance of Title Optimization

Your website’s title is one of the first things that your users will see. This means that optimizing your WordPress website’s title is essential to ensure a positive customer experience. Additionally, having an effective WordPress website title contributes significantly to a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. This is because optimization of your website title and meta tags can set your website apart from other competitors, maximize your competitive advantage and increase your click through rate.

 

In this article, we provide some of the key recommendations on WordPress website’s title optimization and title tag optimization to strengthen your SEO strategy. Let’s dive into it!

How to Optimize WordPress Page Titles For SEO

Since the title of your website is likely the first thing that your users will see, it’s best to reflect the most important elements of your website within the title. To best reflect your website’s key elements, you will first need to identify your target audience and find how your website content can benefit your users. 

 

The first step is to identify your target audience through competitor analysis and researching market trends. Identifying your target audience and their demands is beneficial because this key information can reveal what your target audience is likely searching for in search engines. You can then use these insights in conjunction with the unique benefits of your website, to inform the most relevant keywords to include within your page title and appeal directly to your target user. We recommend that you include relevant keywords that encapsulate your website benefits and contents in your WordPress page titles to benefit your SEO strategy and improve your search engine ranking. 

 

Once you’ve identified the key elements and benefits of your website’s content, it’s important to include relevant keywords that reflect these benefits to improve your site’s SEO. To do so, try to incorporate phrases that your target audience are likely to search for. Once implementing these keywords, the search engine used by your audience will be more likely to list your page in their top results. Getting your website in the top results of your target audience’s search query can lead to greater brand awareness and a higher click through rate!

 

Now that you have your title optimization strategy in place, it’s time to match your WordPress title to your website branding. Incorporating your title within your overall branding helps to maintain consistency, increase perceived validity of your website, and improve the user experience as a whole. To match your website’s title with your branding, ensure that all logos, colours, and elements are consistent throughout your whole WordPress website. 

 

As a whole, it’s recommended that you implement an effective title optimization strategy through identifying your website’s unique selling position, including relevant keywords, and matching your title to your branding, to improve your website’s SEO and your customer’s overall experience. 

What are Meta Tags & Title Tags?

Meta tags are part of your website’s code that provide specific data about your website, such as the author, keywords, and description. These key details are important to include within the meta tags because it helps search engines understand what your website is all about. After gathering this information, the search engine compares the keywords within each of these sections and ranks your site depending on how well all of the information matches. As such, meta tag optimization is important to boost the ranking of your website on your customer’s search engine results.

 

It is important to note that WordPress does not automatically contain the description and keywords meta tag data. This means that you’ll have to manually add in your own meta tags to provide search engines with your website’s key details.

 

The most important type of meta tag is a title tag. Essentially, the title tag is a piece of HTML code that exists in the head section of each webpage. The purpose of the title tag is to indicate the title of the webpage and encapsulate the page’s subject matter. Search engines then use your title tag as the overall ‘title’ of your page. 

 

The title tag is also important because it shows as the blue link on your target audience’s search engine results pages, and also at the top of the browser window. This means that title tags can significantly impact your search engine ranking, because they determine the text seen by your customers. The relevance of this text essentially influences whether or not your audience clicks through to your website when it shows up in their search results. Consider the Brisbane WordPress web design service here for your next project and reach out to one of our WordPress developer.

Meta Tag & Title Tag Optimization Strategies For SEO

One of the easiest ways to help improve your rankings on Google is to optimize title tags, because they signal to Google what your page is all about. Title tags have also been identified as a significant ranking factor, meaning that Google uses your title tag to match how relevant your content is to the user’s search query. An effective title improves the user experience by enticing users to click on your webpage, which directly encourages more clicks and user engagement. Therefore, it is important to optimize your title tags to improve both your website’s SEO and your user’s experience. 

meta tags optimization

 

To help you get started with optimizing your title tags for SEO, we’ve broken it down into three key best practices:

 

  1. Use Unique Titles

Using distinctive title tags help to distinguish your webpage from other comparable brands, which can consequently influence a user to click on your webpage first. Additionally, incorporating a keyword in your original title can help to make the page title SEO-friendly, and consequently improve the search engine ranking of your website. By including a keyword in your unique title, this also makes the page title more intuitive for the reader causing a greater click through rate.

 

  1. Focus on One Keyword

It’s important to include a keyword to represent your page to ensure that your page is matching for the most relevant search terms. However, it is best to only include one primary keyword in your title tag because multiple keywords can negatively impact your SEO organic search traffic, therefore decreasing your page ranking and click through rate. As such, it is recommended that you use a simple and relevant title that includes one primary keyword to optimize your title tags SEO. 

 

  1. Keep it Concise

To improve your webpage’s SEO, it’s important to keep your title tags between 50-60 characters long. If the title is too long, Google has a tendency to shorten or re-write your title tags. If Google re-writes your title tag, there’s a chance that the version they generate won’t make any sense and may lead to a negative user experience. Some strategies to keep your titles brief include avoiding all uppercase letters, removing the brand name (unless it is essential) and using symbols to save space. Therefore, you should endeavour to keep your title tags between 50-60 characters to ensure your tags remain relevant to influence a positive user experience.

How Digital8 Can Help Improve SEO Title Tag & SEO Page Title

Our Brisbane SEO specialists are experts when it comes to understanding the search engine algorithms, so we understand the page optimization measures required to improve your site’s search result ranking. If you’re looking to grow your business and boost your site’s visibility, get in touch with our friendly website development team today

 

How to Find & Remove Negative Keywords From Your Ad Account

With over 99,000 Google searches happening every second, it’s important to ensure that your Google Ad is being shown to your most relevant audiences. A highly effective method to achieve this is by optimizing your Google AdWords management campaigns with relevant keywords. The key to Adwords campaign optimization is to find and exclude any negative keywords that may adversely impact your campaign performance. By including only the most relevant keywords, and removing any irrelevant negative keywords, your Google Ads will be shown to your ideal customers. Consequently, showing your Google Ads to the right audience boosts relevant ad clicks, conversions and can increase overall return on investment.

This blog article will cover valuable insights into how you can spot and remove irrelevant negative keywords and use them to optimize your Adwords campaign for success.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are phrases that are selectively excluded from Ad campaigns to improve the relevance of the Ad. There are three types of negative keywords; negative broad match, negative phrase match, and negative exact match keywords.

Negative broad match keywords allow you to exclude your Ad from searches that include every word of your negative keyword phrase, even if the words are in a different order. On the other hand, negative exact match keywords allow you to exclude your Ad only from searches of the exact keyword phrase, without any additional words or phrases. Alternatively, negative phrase match keywords allow you to exclude your Ad from searches that include the exact negative keyword phrase in the same order.

Why Is It Important To Remove Negative Keywords?

It is important to find and remove negative keywords from your Google Ads account for two main reasons; to reduce wasteful Ad spend and to improve the chances of your Ad being shown to your most relevant target audience.

Identifying and removing negative keywords is essential to ensuring that your Google Adwords ad spend is being allocated efficiently. The removal of negative keywords excludes certain phrases from your Ad campaign, allowing you to focus your advertising budget on only the most relevant and beneficial search terms and keywords. If you think about it, including undesirable keywords within your campaign will cost money that you don’t need to be spending, because the audience that the Ad is shown to is likely looking for something else, not directly for what you are offering. By removing these negative keywords, you can then allocate more Ad spend on the most relevant keywords, which will appeal to your most interested users and drive most relevant clicks and conversions. This is why identifying and removing negative keywords can help to lower the Ad spend and improve the return on investment, by showing your Ad to only the most relevant and interested audience.

An additional benefit of finding and removing negative keywords is to prevent your Ads from appearing for Google searches that are not relevant to your business. By removing negative keywords, you are ensuring that your products are put in front of the right customers, to ultimately improve your conversion rate. As such, removing all negative keywords will ensure that your Ads reach your best potential audiences when they are searching for your products or services. These relevant audiences are more likely to convert, increasing your click through rate, conversion rate and conversions.

In summary, the purpose of removing negative keywords is to narrow the focus of your Ads campaign, by removing any irrelevant keyword phrases and honing in on the most relevant keywords that matter the most to your target audience. As a result, using negative keywords to put your ad in front of an interested audience helps to maximize clicks due to your Ad relevance, boost conversion/leads and overall return on investment.

Strategies to Find & Remove Negative Keywords

To create a negative keywords list, you will first need to identify words or phrases that you don’t want to trigger your ads. For example, if your product is high end and prestigious, you won’t want words such as “cheap” triggering your ads, because this will show up in front of an audience that is likely not interested in investing in your product. In turn, removing this negative keyword can help to save your Ad budget by applying the Ad spend to keywords that are more likely to convert and generate a greater return on investment.

A great place to start is within the Google Adwords interface itself. The Google Adwords interface makes finding and adding negative keywords simple, with the integrated Google keyword planner and Google search terms report.

  1. Use Google Keyword Planner
    The Google Keyword Planner is a valuable tool for conducting keyword research and discovering new relevant or related keywords. One of its most beneficial features is the ability to analyze past search volume data and view search volume forecasts for particular keywords, which can help to inform how appealing certain keywords will be to your target audience. Although the primary purpose of the Google Keyword Planner is to find the most suitable and relevant keywords for your campaign, it is also an effective tool when identifying negative keywords on Adwords. For example, if you enter the word “shoes,” the Google keywords finder results will show you the aggregate number of monthly searches for that phrase and related phrases such as “basketball shoes.” However, if you are exclusively selling tennis shoes, you may not want to include the keyword “shoes” to ensure that you don’t target the audience searching for “basketball shoes.” The Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool to conduct keyword research and more importantly, identify negative keywords for your campaign.
  2. Analyze Your Google Search Terms Report
    Another useful negative keywords tool within the Google Ads interface is the search terms report. The search terms report in your Adwords campaign can be used to identify what phrases or words are triggering your ads. This presents the opportunity to effectively identify and remove any irrelevant search terms and keywords. By adding these irrelevant search terms to a negative keyword list, you can optimize your Adwords performance and ensure that your Ads are only triggering for your target audience’s searches. It is recommended to go through your search results report as regularly as possible, to ensure that your Google Adwords campaign is fully optimized. If you ever want to review your negative keyword list, Google Ads negative keywords can be found in the Google Ads interface under the ‘Keywords’ section.

Need Help Getting Your Ads In Front Of The Right Audience?

Mastering the art of keywords research is definitely not easy, which is why our skilled team is here to help! Our digital marketing and Local SEO team have many years of experience in keyword research and Google Ads optimization. Whether you are just starting out, or need a helping hand to grow your existing Ads campaign, we are always looking to help like-minded businesses harness the power of negative keyword research to put their Ads in front of the right audience. Get in touch with our friendly team to optimize your Google Ads campaign today!