Party Rental SEO: Title Tags

Title tags are part of your website’s HTML code and are meant to be a concise description of what’s on the page. Most experts agree that the title tag is a critical component of on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO), second only to content in importance.

How To Check It

You can check your title tag for any given page on your website by hovering over the page tab at the top of your browser. The title tag is the text that appears in the little box that pops up.

Where Else Does It Appear?

In addition to the browser tab, the title tag shows up in two other places.

1) Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The title tag is the headline to your listing. Keep in mind though that search engines may change up your title a bit. In this example, they added my brand name prior to the title. This causes the backend of my title to be cut off. However, most of what is cut is the brand name in my title tag. For this reason you want to frontload your title tag with your primary keyword. The headline here is 56 characters, but only the first 34 characters of my title tag are displayed.  

2) External websites, especially social media websites. The example below is from Facebook.

Optimal Format For Home Page Title Tag

According to Moz.com the optimal format for a title tag is the following:

Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

So I decided to use “Moon Bounce Rentals | Delco, Main Line, West Chester | Boing! Bounce Rentals” as my title tag.

Format for Other Pages

Every page on your site should have a unique title tag.  One suggestion is to use the above formula for your Home page, which is the your most visited and most important page and use the following formula for your other pages.  

Brand Name | Name of Page

Example: Boing! Bounce Rentals | About Us

Ideal Length

As a general rule, the ideal length is 50-60 characters if you want your entire title tag to display in your search engine results. Google will display an ellipsis (“…”) when the end of a title tag has been cut short. Even so, it is better to write a really good title tag than to get too overly concerned about the length. My current title tag is 76 characters, including spaces, so it is usually going to be cut short. Most SEO experts agree though that even the words that get chopped off still factor into your ranking.

A Local Business Should Optimize for Local Search

Since a party rental company is a local business, when our customers search for what we offer they are typically going to type in 1) what they want and, 2) a location.  For example, they may type in “moon bounce rental springfield PA”.

To optimize your title tag for local search, your primary keyword should be your main offering. Your secondary keyword should be the area you service.

As mentioned in my prevous post on SEO, being in a delivery business, we service multiple towns.  But you can’t put every town in your title tag, so sum up your delivery area in a short phrase.  

I’m located just outside of Philadelphia, but I focus on the suburbs, not the city. I do not want to use the phrase “Philadelphia Suburbs” because it focuses on the word “Philadelphia” and I don’t want to target Philadelphia.

So I used a few terms that cover 90% of my delivery area. “Delco” which is a commonly used abbreviation for the county in which we are based. “Main Line” which represents an area that covers a large section of the western suburbs we service (mostly outside of Delco). “West Chester”, which covers the largest town we service, outside of Delco and the Main Line.

What you do will be different, but I’ve provided the details of what I did as an example to help.

How to Change Your Title Tag

You may be wondering how to change your title tag. If you use our party rental software, this is easily done in your admin section under the Website menu item. If you built your website, you should have a backend admin section in your website builder software that will allow you to make this change. If you hired a professional to build your site, you should contact them to make the change.

In Conclusion

Title tags are a very important part of on-page SEO, ranking second only to content.  The good news is that they are easy to optimize for search by following a few simple guidelines.