Page Titles (also called as Title Tags) are similar to page headings – they tell both users and search engines what the content on a particular page is about. The Page Title is the first thing your visitors see in the search results. Also, it is one of the most important ranking factors in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Continue reading to learn more about page titles and how you can craft and use them to your benefit.
Where are Title Tags displayed on your website?
Considering the fact that Title Tags play an important role in on-page SEO, you would imagine that they are displayed somewhere prominently inside the visible page. Strangely not!
1. Title Tags get picked up by search engines and are displayed as the title in your search results.
2. Title Tags are displayed at the top of the browser window.
3. Title Tags are used as the title when you bookmark web pages.
4. Title Tags are used as headings when you share pages on social media websites.
5. For those of you who understand HTML code, <title> tags are placed within the <head> tag.
6. Title Tags might also be copied into the subject line when you share pages using email applications.
Contextual importance of Page Titles
A well formed and crafted Page Title will make you standout in search results and social media posts. It will encourage potential visitors to click on your link and visit your website. Which one of the following titles do you think will lure you?
Website content writing | Search engine optimisation | Marketing blog Hi…
Sounds spammy and not well formed
OR
The Guide to Writing Website Content That Sells | High On Digital
Proper construct and good choice of words
The key phrase to keep in mind when writing Page Titles is “Quality over Quantity”. You have to accurately describe the content that your visitors will find on the page. Only then will you attract the right kind of visitors – who will convert into leads and customers. What you don’t want, is to attract masses of visitors to your page, who then realise that the content on the page is not what they are looking for, and leave at once – while you pay for the server resources and bandwidth that they consume! Also, Google will know when visitors land on your page and leave immediately, and assume that your page is not worth being ranked high.
Keyword importance of Page Titles
Search engines are extremely smart, yet they can only learn from the words that you feed them. You cannot expect to be found for the search phrase “guide to writing website content” when your Page Title says “Page Number Two”.
Your focus / target keywords should be present (ideally, closer to the front) in the Page Title. This doesn’t mean that you should coin a Page Title like “Guide to Writing Website Content, Write Good Website Content, How to Write Website Content”. That would be considered as keyword stuffing and be marked as spam.
Striking a perfect balance between keyword inclusion, readability, and relevance is the secret to writing Page Titles that will work wonders for your website.
Three best practices to writing Title Tags
1. Write concise Title Tags
Length – Title Tags in Google search results can be up to about 512 pixels wide. This width is not officially published by Google, but is tested and estimated by us experts. In terms of character count, you could fit about 50 to 60 characters. Now, be mindful! If you had a sentence full of W’s, you might use up your 512 pixel width in under 35 characters while you could fit about 120 I’s in the same space. If you exceed the pixel width, Google will add three periods (Ellipsis) at an abrupt position and discard everything that follows it. So there’s no use writing an essay for a Title Tag.
Try to place the focus keyword closer to the front of the Title Tag. If possible, do away with conjunctions. You could turn ‘and’ into ‘&’ and save a few pixels. Or, use the pipe character (‘|’) to split words.
2. Keep Title Tags relevant to the content on your pages
This is the hard part – summarise your entire page in under 50 characters. I’ve reduced the character count from 60 to 50 so you can leave room for your brand name. It is important to have your brand name in the Title Tag. The brand name could be placed at the start or end of the Title Tag depending on the emotional and brand identification effects that it creates.
3. Make the Title Tag readable and tease your visitors’ curiosity
Instead of throwing in all your keywords in preferential order try to make a meaningful sentence out of them. Or, line them up in a way that makes better reading. Your Title Tag should appeal to your visitors’ senses. There are going to be many links on the search results page and which one is the visitor going to click on? Stand out!
4. Ensure uniqueness in Title Tags
Finally, ensure that every page’s Title Tag is unique. If two pages are too similar and the Title Tags might be the same, consider using a canonical tag to ask Google to index only one of the two pages.
I hope the above information on Page Titles will be useful and you will be able to use Page Titles to your benefit. Please feel free to post any questions, suggestions and feedback that you might have in the comments section below! I look forward to hearing from you.