Web Page Titles - What are they and how to use them. SEO jargon buster

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.

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 about the pages than the simple 'About me' or 'Home Page' or 'Services' etc... Google let you write a separate SEO page title of up to 70 characters (including spaces) we find it better to try and keep titles to 60.

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.

Google the following sentence:

"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"

You should see this page listed with the title " Web Page Titles - What are they and how to use them. SEO jargon...".

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 60 long, including spaces.They can be longer but ny 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 60 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 descriptive of the content on the page. Google views writing deliberately misleading Title Tags as cheating and will penalize 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). If 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.