This month Pam Ann Aungst, our resident SEO expert, talks a bit about Keyword placement in page and heading titles.  

This is how a page title appears in a browser:

And here is how a page title appears in a search engine results page (SERP)

Titles and headings on a webpage hold more weight keyword-wise than the rest of the text, and the first few words in that title or heading hold a lot more weight than the rest.

You are highly likely to rank well for your own company name even if you don't try to, so what you need to use as the first few words in your titles and headings are the keywords that describe your business.  These are the words that a searcher is going to type in when they know what type of firm they are looking for, but aren't aware that you exist, and that's precisely when you want to be showing up in search results. 

Keyword Placement in Page Titles

Title tags for all pages should be optimized, but for varying phrases.  Be sure to follow these guidelines for page titles (including blog article titles):

• Make all page titles unique (do not duplicate a page title anywhere on the site)
• Make the title relevant to the page content
• Include desired keywords in the first few words of the title
• Only one or two desired key phrases per title
• Do not exceed 65 characters in length or 8 words
• Do not repeat words more than 2 times
• Avoid "stop words" (pronouns, prepositions and grammatical particles) such as a, about, an, as, are, but, be, or, and, for and others
• Divide phrases with | symbol (shift + \)
• Other acceptable symbols: &, ©, ®, ™, *, §, -, ¤, °, », /