Title Tags: A beginner’s intro into the basics

In this SEO training course, SEO Expert Colm Docherty discusses the basics of Title Tags and how to use them to improve your website rankings.

Video Transcript

What is a title tag?

What is a title tag? A title tag is two things really, depending on where you’ve seen them. If you do a Google search, for example, or let’s say technical SEO agency, and you look at the results at the top of page one, you’ll see that blue text technical SEO agency, technical SEO services, that blue text you see in the search results.

That’s what we call a title tag. Another place you might have seen them is when you’re on a website. So for example, when you hover over the tab at the top of whatever page it is you’re looking at, you’ll see that it says the same thing that you saw in the blue text.

Why are title tags important?

Why am I talking about title tags? Why are they important? They’re important for couple of really big reasons. The biggest reason they’re important is because they are one of the single largest influencers of how well your page ranks in the search engines. Now, the other reason that they’re really important is because it’s actually an influencing signal that you can control. So unlike with link building where you’re relying on third parties to do you a favor, the title tag is something you can control because you set it within your own website.

What this means is you have a very big lever you can pull to massively improve your rankings. If you get your title tag right. So how do you use title tags? Well, the key thing that you need to know is you’ve got to use popular search terms that people are using to find services or products that you offer, but they don’t necessarily know the name of the company providing them.

Keyword importance

Back in the day, for those that you remember, we used to have the Yellow Pages. You knew you needed the services of an accountant, for example. Well, you go to the accountant section of the Yellow Pages, and then you would come through all the listings of accountants and pick one that you liked. So let’s say, for example, you’re a car detailer in Manchester.

What kind of terms might people search for to find the services that you offer, without knowing the name of your company that happens to offer car detailing in Manchester? If we do a quick search to see what we call monthly search volumes are for the term car detailing in Manchester, we find that that’s a very popular term to use.

It gets 880 searches a month. However, if we do a bit more research, we find out that the search term car cleaning Manchester gets 1300 searches a month. Now that’s a big difference. So when it comes to the idea of including your keywords within the title tag, good practice is to include the terms that have the highest search volume, so it’s important that you do your keyword research to understand which terms have what search volume.

Some terms that can mean the same thing, have wildly different search volumes, and you want to be focusing on the ones that have the highest.

Where do you edit your title tag?

So now that we know what a title tag is, why they’re important, and have some basic understanding of how you use them, let’s talk about where you actually find them to be able to edit them and change them to be what it is you want them to say.

Well, depending on the platform that your website is hosted on, you’ll find them in different places called different things. For example, in WordPress it’s called an SEO title, whilst in Shopify it’s called a page title, but they’re both exactly the same thing. And that is what we call in the industry a title tag. So this all sounds amazing, you say, but slow down.

Title tag best practices

Hold your horses. There’s some things you need to know about how to do title tags properly. And getting it wrong can have big consequences.

Character/Pixel width limit

The first thing to know is character limits. How many words or characters can you put in a title tag that is acceptable? Well, for a long time it used to be based on the total number of characters where there was a max limit.

Now, depending on who you are and how long you’ve been an SEO, that varies from 55 characters up to about 70. In recent years, it’s changed from a character limit to pixel width limit. Now, this is important because if you think about it, you can get a lot more eyes in a title tag than you can double use.

Why? Because W is a wider character than I. So when you’re crafting your title tags, you want to be clever about the wording that you use and try and minimize the width of the characters that you’re using.

Title tag separators

And that brings us on nicely to how do you separate sections of the title tag. So sometimes the way the keywords are separated from the company name at the end is done with a hyphen, and sometimes you’ll see that it’s done with what we call a pipe, which is just a vertical line.

Think about it which one’s wider, the pipe or the hyphen? That’s right. You’ve guessed it. Best practice use a pipe. Why? Because you’re saving on pixel width so you can get more important words in your title tag.

Company name placement

It is best practice to put your company name at the end of your title tags. This helps build brand authority, expertise, credibility, and trust.

However, if you’ve got a company name that is very long, you might want to consider shortening that in some sort of abbreviation that still recognizes your company for what it is.

Keyword placement

Another important thing to note is that you should put your most important keywords towards the beginning of the title tag. The search engines for a long time have taken the view that the words and terms used at the beginning of a title tag carry more weight than those used at the end.

Why is that? Well, it’s the first thing you’re talking about. It’s a bit like in real life, really. If you’ve got important news that you want to tell somebody, you tell them that first before the more mundane stuff that’s going on in your life that day. The same applies here. So best practice is to put your keywords with the highest search for them at the beginning of the title tag.

That way, you’re giving yourself the very best chance of improving your rankings for that particular keywords.

Automatic rewrites

Another thing to note is control. It used to be that back in the day, what you entered as your title tag was what you got, what you saw in the search engine results. But now Google has taken it upon themselves to start rewriting your title tags.

If they don’t like the look of it, or they think that they understand your page better than what you’ve written. When you see this happening, you’ve got to think about why that might be. Is the intent of the page as clear as it could be? Are you confusing the search engines? And they’re feeling like they need to rewrite it.

Because if you’re too to limit or your pixel limit is beyond the scope of what the search analyst want to see, you’ll see that ugly three dots at the end of your title tag, where it just gets cut off abruptly and nobody wants that. So now that you know what a title tag is, what you should be putting in it, which is your high volume keywords and some of the do’s and don’ts around it.

Keyword stuffing & penalties

Sounds like you’re all set, right? Not so fast. Something we need to talk about, which is really important, is keyword stuffing. What you don’t want to do after you’ve done all your keyword research, is for every single variation of that search term into your title tag. The search engines don’t like it, and if you’re doing it really aggressively, you will get penalized and penalized.

In search engine world is not a nice place to be. Why? Quite simply, Google and other search engines such as Microsoft can give you a penalty, and these penalties can vary wildly from an algorithmic one, where the system automatically decides that you’ve done something naughty to what we call a manual penalty. And a manual penalty is incredibly difficult to get rid of.

And that’s something we’ll talk about in another video.

Roundup

So the takeaway here is don’t keyword stuff. Keep it to the character limit or the pixel limit. Keep it to your most important keywords only and put your company name at the end. So that’s it from me. Hopefully you found that really useful and we’ll have some more videos coming soon.