The title of your page is one of the most important SEO ranking factors. It is also perhaps the most overlooked factor. A good title will increase click through rate while a bad title will decrease it drastically. So what makes a good or bad title?
A well-written title can entice people to click on your content. Choosing the right words and using them in the right way will help you get those clicks.
The first step is to understand what makes a good title for SEO purposes.
This post will teach you:
Best practices for writing descriptive <title> elements
In order to maximize the click-through rate from search results, your site’s title should be relevant and descriptive. Title text is often the primary piece of information a user will see in a search result, so make sure it clearly conveys why your page is relevant to their query.
- 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 in the title tag. Having a few descriptive words in the <title> element is fine, but don’t repeat the same words or phrases over and over again. Title text like “Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars” doesn’t help users and can make your results look spammy to Google.
- Avoid using the same 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.
One option is to update the <title> element with words that reflect actual content on your page. For example, if you have video or lyrics, include the word “video” or “lyrics”. Another solution is to use the actual name of your band in the <title> element and write a concise description for your content in the meta description section.
- 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> Example Social Site, a place to meet and socialize</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.
For Example:
<title> Example Social Site: Sign Up for new Account</title>
- Be careful of preventing 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 Google discovers it by following a link from someone else’s site. To prevent a URL from being indexed, you can use the noindex directive.
How title links in Google Search are created
Google’s generation of title links on the Google Search results page is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page and references to it that appear on the web. The goal of a title link is to best represent and describe each result.
Google Search uses the following sources to automatically determine title links:
- Content in <title> elements
- Main visual title or headline shown on a page
- Heading elements, such as <h1> elements
- Anchor text on the page
- Text within links that point to the page
While Google can’t manually change title links for individual sites, they are always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the title link that’s displayed for your page by following best practices.
Avoid common issues with <title> elements
Here are the most common issues Google see for <title> elements on web pages.
- Half Empty Title Elements: When part of the title text is missing.
For Example:
<title>| Site Name</title>
- Outdated Title Element: When a page is used year-after-year for recurring information, but the <title> element didn’t get updated to reflect the latest date.
For Example:
<title>2020 admissions criteria – University of Awesome</title>
- Inaccurate Title Element: When the <title> elements don’t accurately reflect what the page is about.
For Example:
<title>Giant stuffed animals, teddy bears, polar bears – Site Name</title>
Conclusion:
If you want to increase your blog traffic, the title of your blog post is crucial. You want to make sure that it’s SEO optimized so people can find it in search engines like Google.
We at AI Advertisment focus on working according to Google’s latest guidelines and parameters to boost the Search Engine Optimization of your website. We use AI Powered Tools to generate best SEO elements for your website.
Related Articles
How to Set Up Google Analytics: A Step-by-Step Guide
Top 10 SEO Metrics You Should Pay Attention To (And 4 That Are a Complete Waste)
Latest SEO Techniques According To Top SEO Experts.