Title Tags: What are they?
The title tag is an HTML code tag that allows you to give a web page a title. This title can be found in the browser title bar, as well as in the search engine results pages (SERP). It's crucial to add and optimise your website's title tags, as they play an essential role in terms of organic ranking (SEO).
The title tag is the spot in the html where you define what will show up in these places. Generally you add it to the html in the page header with a tag that looks like: <title> Title of Your Page </title>
eg
But if there's any HTML tag you absolutely have to know, it's the title tag. Basically, the title tag names your website and tells search engines what it is. It's one of the first things search engines analyze when determining how to rank your page.
One of the first things most website owners learn about SEO is how little power you truly have. A lot of what determines where your website’s pages will show up in the rankings is outside of your control. But those limitations make it all the more important to do what you can with the parts you can control.
Every business can at least practice good on-site optimization. It’s a relatively cheap and easy way to give your website an edge over the (surprisingly) numerous sites that don’t bother to do it.
Along with meta descriptions and on-page optimization, one of the most important on-page ranking factors you have control over is the title tag.
What Do I Put On A Title Tag?
8 Tips for Writing Title Tags
- Write unique titles for every page.
- Pay attention to length.
- Use your target keyword (but don't overdo it).
- Be descriptive of what's on the page.
- Make a (brief) case for what's on the page.
- Use relevant, high-quality images.
- Customize the filename.
- Use alt text.
Title links are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it's relevant to their query. It's often the primary piece of information people use to decide which result to click on, so it's important to use high-quality title text on your web pages.
Whats Important
Make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> element.Write descriptive and concise text for your <title> elements. Avoid vague descriptors like "Home" for your home page, or "Profile" for a specific person's profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose text in your <title> elements, which is likely to get truncated when it shows up in search results.
Avoid keyword stuffing. It's sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the <title> element, but there's no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. Title text like "Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars" doesn't help the user, and this kind of keyword stuffing can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.
Avoid repeated or boilerplate text in <title> elements. It's important to have distinct, descriptive text in the <title> element for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site "Cheap products for sale", for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish between two pages. Long text in the <title> element that varies by only a single piece of information ("boilerplate" titles) is also bad; for example, a common <title> element for all pages with text like "Band Name - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts" contains a lot of uninformative text.
One solution is to dynamically update the <title> element to better reflect the actual content of the page. For example, include the words "video", "lyrics", etc., only if that particular page contains video or lyrics. Another option is to just use the actual name of the band as a concise text in the <title> element and use the meta description to describe your page's content.
Brand your titles concisely. The <title> element on your site's home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site. For example:
<title>ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle</title>
But displaying that text in the <title> element of every single page on your site will look repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query. In this case, consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each <title> element, separated from the rest of the text with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe, like this:
<title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.</title>
Be careful about disallowing search engines from crawling your pages. Using the robots.txt protocol on your site can stop Google from crawling your pages, but it may not always prevent them from being indexed. For example, Google may index your page if we discover it by following a link from someone else's site. If we don't have access to the content on your page, we will rely on off-page content to generate the title link, such as anchor text from other sites. To prevent a URL from being indexed, you can use the noindex directive.
For more helpful advice read our previous blogs or sign up for our monthly newsletter https://www.greenhammerdigital...
