Web Page Titles
SEO Jargon Explained
Web Page Titles and How To Use Them
Web Page Titles are vitally important as they are what tell the search engine and your visitors what the web page is about. They are supposed to be an accurate and concise description of your page's content.
Your Web Page title is not just what you put in the title bar in the top of the page you are writing.
If left unmodified the search engine will add information it has taken from your Website (such as the website name) to your page title and display it as part of the page title in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
Write Better Page Titles With Title Tags
Because you need your web page titles to say more the pages than the simple 'About me' or 'Home Page' or 'Services' etc... You write in the title bar, Google let you write a separate SEO page title of up to 70 characters (including spaces).
This descriptive title is called a Title Tag and the information in it will appear as your title in the SERPS, but not as your title on the Web Page.
The page title can also be read at the top of the browser window. If you hover your cursor over the tag for this page a box should open with its title: Web Page Titles - What are they and how to use them. SEO jargon buster.
This is because the SEO page title is a Meta Tag (Data written for search engines which is not displayed on the web page) see our Jargon buster article What are Meta Tags.
The working title of this page is 'Web Page Titles' this is what is written in the title bar of this pages editor, if left it would read in the SERPS as "Web Page Titles - Mekatrig"
But if you look in the SERPS this page is listed with the title " Web Page Titles - What are they and how to use them. SEO jargon buster"
This is because I have used a Title Tag which the search engine lists instead of the page title in my page's editor.
For WordPress users writing an SEO title is very simple to write, the free Yoast SEO plug-in has an entry on every page where you can write both the Title Tag and meta description or snippet (See What are Meta tags) without using any code.
Tips on writing titles:
Length: Title tags should be a maximum of 70 characters long, including spaces. Any characters over 70 will not be shown
Unique: Do not duplicate Title Tags, use a different one for every page.
Keyword Placement: Your Pages most important keywords make up the first part of your title tag, followed by the page description don't stuff the tag with keywords.
Wording: Keep it short but with impact, think of it as a compressed tweet, make your statement in 70 characters instead of 140.
Company Name: If you have room left then put it at the end of the title tag.
Relevancy: I cannot stress how important this is Title tags MUST be written to be descriptive of the content on the page. Google views writing deliberately misleading Title Tags as cheating and will penalise your website for it.
Meta Description: ( see What are meta tags) Page Titles need to work well with the Meta Description (sometimes called a snippet). Once these two things are done properly (optimized) there will be a marked improvement on the pages listing.
For more advice on this take a look at Googles Webmasters guide to creating good titles and snippets in search results.
Have a look at some of our other SEO Jargon buster articles to help with your DIY SEO.