Creative Connections

Key Facts - Quick Reference

• Your title tags should be no more than 66 characters long including spaces
• Title tags should contain a maximum of 12 Keywords
• Keywords should not be repeated more than twice in a title tag
• Title tags should accurately describe the page content to both search engines and visitors
• Use words that you think a user would type when searching to find a product or page
• Every web page on your site should ideally have a unique title tag

Title Tags Overview

Page title tags are a very important part of search engine optimisation and should be given thought and implemented correctly. They have two main equally important functions:

Title tags tell search engines what a page is about, which is why it is so important that they accurately describe the actual content on the page. A crucial principle to understand and constantly remind yourself is that a search engine's overriding concern is to give the user as accurate as possible search results. For this reason search engines give a lot of weight to the title tag and its accuracy in relation to the page content.

The contents of your title tag will usually be the first line of the search result for your page and will be what the user reads and very very quickly decides whether or not to click through to your site.  Below is an example of Google using a page title (the page title is the purple text):

With this in mind you want to ensure that your title tag grabs the user's attention and draws him or her in, at the very least to continue reading the rest of the search result text but ideally to click through to your site.

Page title tags also provide the text that you see on your browser tabs.

For further reading on the title tag take a look at the Google Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide. It really is worth taking the time to understand how to make the best use of your web site page title tags.

Look out for my next blog “The Search Engine Optimisation Journey: Stage 4 - Introducing the Description Meta Tag”.