Title Tags
Title Tags are one of the most important On-Page SEO factors. They can have a tremendous influence on your rankings in the search engines. When writing your title tags there are a few things you should keep in mind.
- Keywords in Title Tags are a must.
- Title Tags are the main reason a searcher clicks through to a site.
The image below is a screenshot of a Google search result.
The blue clickable text of the search result is that pages Title Tag. A pages Title Tag can also be seen in the very top left corner of your web browser.
In the search results, people are more likely to click through to a site that has the keyword phrase they searched for in the blue hyperlinked text. The search engines are also more likely to rank your site if the keyword is in the title tag.
From looking at the image above you can see, that web page is targeting the keyword phrase "Phoenix real estate" and "Phoenix Arizona real estate". If someone searched for either of those keyword phrases they would be very likely to click through to that site.
Now you need to put this knowledge to work. The first page you should be working on is the Home-page of your site. If you have been following this guide you should already have your keyword list and know what keywords you are going to be targeting for your home-page.
Most real estate website providers have wizened up and givin the agent control over the Title Tags. I can't tell you where to find this as all real estate CMS's are different. There should be a forum, tutorials, FAQ page or something that will help you figure this out in your online office(the back end of your website where you make changes and add new content). If there is no help you need to contact the tech support or customer service department of your provider and have them help you.
If, for whatever reason, your provider doesn't have a way for you to change the Title Tags of your web pages, I would suggest you find a new website provider.
Once you get your homepage title tags set up. Go to that page, look in the very top left corner of your browser and make sure it is changed. The search engines will not update it until they notice the change which can be some time(The longest I've seen them take is about two weeks and that was for a very new site).
You should edit the Title Tags for all your pages, and they should all be unique. But you can hold off on the other pages for now while you learn the process. Once you have finished the On-page portion of you home-page you can go back and do it to all your other pages.
Note: Most real estate website providers have default pages already set up for you(these will usually be consider duplicate content as they are usually the same on every agents website who is using the same provider as you).
These are almost always going to be worthless for ranking for the duplicate content reason. Some of them are good for your clients and it is your decision whether you want to keep them or replace them with your own content.
If you decide to get rid of any of these default pages you will need to delete all links pointing to them. You shouldn't delete the pages themselves rather just all the links pointing to them.
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