How do you write a good title tag?
What does Google say about title tags?
Here is a summary of Google’s own guidelines regarding writing title tags:
Create unique, accurate titles for each web page
Keep your title tags brief
Use the title tag to accurately describe the page’s content
Avoid stuffing the title tag with keywords
It’s good to have these ground rules from Google when choosing what to write in your title tags, but it’s also vital to know that best practices surrounding this element have changed over time as SERPs have evolved and search engine behavior has altered.
What do you need to know about title tag rewrites?
One of the most recent and dramatic alterations to Google’s handling of title tags is the frequency with which they now rewrite them. In other words, you may write what you think of as the best possible title tag for one of your pages, but Google may rewrite it for display in the SERPs. Here’s what you need to know about this behavior.
In a Moz study of 57,832 title tags, Dr. Peter J. Meyers found that Google rewrote 58% of them. Please read the full study to understand further nuances of these percentages.
A separate study by Cyrus Shepard of 80,959 title tags found that Google rewrote 61%.
These studies speculate, based on their findings, that some of the factors which cause Google to rewrite title tags could include:
Titles that are too short or too long
The repetition of a keyword or keyword phrase within a title
Missing brand names in titles
Superfluous brands names in titles
The use of elements like brackets, parentheses, and pipe marks in titles
The use of identical “boiler plate” titles across multiple pages
Title tags that don’t match the contents of a page
Page contents that do match the search query intent, but the original title tag doesn’t reflect this, so Google rewrites the title to better match the query
The use of superlatives in title tags, like “Best SEO Service” or “Best Restaurant in Town.”
You cannot prevent Google from rewriting your title tags. They are free to display whatever they like in their SERPs. It’s just a fact of online website promotion that Google may rewrite your titles, and you can choose to live with that and focus your SEO energy elsewhere. However, if you strongly feel that Google’s rewrites are undermining the success of your enterprise, the studies cited above make some recommendations for habits you can adopt which might decrease the rewrites you’re experiencing:
Keep title tags between 51-60 total characters, as this length appears to result in the fewest rewrites; note that Google will typically read your entire title tag even if it exceeds 60 characters, but it may truncate or rewrite it for display.
If you are trying to decide between using brackets or parentheses in a title tag, parentheses appear to result in fewer rewrites.
If you are trying to decide between using a dash or a pipe symbol as a separator, the dash appears to result in fewer rewrites.
Avoid using any keyword more than once in your titles.
Experiment with matching your title tag to your header 1 (H1) tag, which typically appears as the title of the main body content on your live web page. Cyrus Shepard’s study found that when these two elements match one another, there was a decrease in title tag rewrites.
For further data and tips on understanding and responding to title tag rewrites read:
https://moz.com/blog/title-tag-patterns-to-avoid
https://moz.com/blog/title-tag-rewrite-case-study
https://moz.com/blog/ways-google-rewrites-title-tags
So, how do you write a good title tag these days?
In this section, we’ll walk you through a 6-step process for writing excellent title tags, step by step.
Step 1: Good title tags start with good research
Effective title tags depend on four types of research: keyword research, customer research, market research, and SERP research. In order to understand what to write about and how to write the title tag for the content you’ve written, spend time:
Using keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to understand how people are searching online for the topics covered by your web pages.
Surveying and polling your customers and logging your conversations with them to understand how they talk about the topics covered by your web pages. How your audience refers to things may differ from how your business speaks of itself and its offering. Note the differences.
Analyzing your mostly highly-ranked online competitors to see how they are writing their title tags when they cover the same topics your web pages are covering. You can do this work manually or use tools like Moz’s True Competitor.
Studying the search engine results for your most important search phrases to see what is already being ranked for them. Don’t just look at your competitors’ title tags, but look at what Google is surfacing in SERP features like the “People Also Ask” and “Related Searches” sections.
Taken altogether, these four types of research should help you determine how to optimize each unique title tag with a combination of the most popular phrases you found via keyword research, the most common and intelligible phrases used by your customers, the most highly-ranked phrases used by your top competitors, and Google’s clues as to other ways in which people might be searching for the topics you cover. Combine all this knowledge with the best practices we’ll summarize next.
Step 2: Incorporate standard best practices
Let’s review what we’ve learned from the studies we’ve cited and incorporate this into how you write your title tags
Be sure the title reflects the page contents accurately.
Keep title tags in the 51-60 character limit, unless you’ve decided to write a longer title knowing that only part of it will display and that it may cause Google to rewrite this element.
Use each keyword phrase only once per title tag.
Use dashes instead of pipes and parentheses instead of brackets.
Write a unique title tag for each page.
*Note that if you are writing title tags for a local business website, it is a standard best practice to be sure you are including geographic terms in your titles. For example, a chain of Mexican food restaurants should be sure the city name “Novato” is part of the title tag for its Novato branch web page, and that “San Rafael” is included in the title tag of its branch page for that location. Don’t depend on Google to assume the location of your business or customers. Make it clear in your title tags, as well as in your page content.
Step 3: Pay attention to Google’s continual emphasis on writing for people, not search engines
If you’ve just started studying SEO, it can be a little confusing at first to get your head around Google’s oft-repeated edict that online publishers should create content for people instead of for search engines. After all, you are writing title tags, in part, so that search engines can understand and display the contents of your web pages. So, practically speaking, you will be thinking of the needs and preferences of search engines when you write each title tag.
But the point Google is really trying to make with this messaging is that they want publishers to focus on the quality of the content human beings encounter on the Internet, rather than focusing on how to manipulate search engines into ranking their content highly. Take a moment to put yourself in the shoes of an online searcher while encountering these two hypothetical title tags. Which would you trust most?
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