The ‘title’ tag is perhaps the most important tag within a site’s page from a standpoint of’ search engine optimization: we are talking about the tag that search engines go to display when searching, the first parameter taken into consideration by spiders.
First, it is important to clarify the title tag to understand what it is: in fact, it is often confused with the ‘title’ when in fact we are talking about two different parameters. The ‘title’ tag is the actual title of the page: in other words, the one that a browser shows in the title bar at the top left. In addition, this tag is the one that goes to appear as clickable text, in dark blue, in search engine results.
The ‘title’ tag is going to be inserted directly into the Html code of the page we are creating; unless we are using a CMS that does it automatically. Conversely, the ‘title’ of an article is what we are going to insert ourselves, by writing it, in the text of a page: this is the case, for example, of the title of a blog post, an article, etc….. compared to the ‘title’ tag, the title is aimed more at readers, to capture their attention and arouse interest, rather than at search engines.
Therefore, as we said, from an SEO perspective, the ‘title’ tag is of paramount importance and should be particularly taken care of, in fact it is among the tags that are checked when performing an Advanced SEO audit. Here are some tips on how to write a proper title tag from an SEO perspective.
Writing a title tag in Seo perspective
Having said the importance of the ‘title’ tag and explained what this is, let’s now go on to see how to optimize it so that our page goes to best indexed on search engines:
- The first rule is to use the right mix of keywords and useful words to accurately describe what we are talking about: to be clear, it is yes important that in the title there is the keyword, possibly placed at the beginning as the first word; but it is equally important that the title be descriptive of what you are writing about. By using only keywords we risk being seen as spam. The advantage will be as much to the search engines as to the readers, who will benefit from a comprehensive description on the topic at hand.
- Limit the length of the title: it is usually recommended to stay between 50 and 60 characters including spaces. A title that goes beyond this threshold is likely to become excessively long and be penalizing: also because searchers on the engines will not be able to read the entire title in the results.
- Do not reuse the same title for multiple pages: this is a practice that should absolutely be avoided. Each page of our site should have a unique title that is different from all the others. Also because if two pages have the same ‘title’ tag, it means that they will also have identical or at least very similar content. In this case, why create two different pages?
- Don’t leave the title blank: perhaps it goes without saying, but a document that turns out ‘untitled’ or similar is about as detrimental to a page’s optimization as it can be.
