Google have posted an article on their Webmaster blog yesterday about the use of Title Tags and how they use them in the search results. They have also clarified why sometimes you see a different title tag in the SERPs to the one you have specified on your page.
So what is a Title Tag?
The title tag of your page is set in the <head> section of the page and can help with the SEO of your website by targeting keywords relevant to the content of a page. When working on the optimisation of a website we review the content on each page of your website and make page by page recommendations for the implementation of your title tags to ensure that you are promoting each of your services against the keywords you want to rank for and that these title tags match your on page content.
When a visitor comes to your website the Title tag is displayed the title bar of their browser or in the tab of the browser.
What Google does with Title tags
The title tag is also shown in the Google SERPs as the blue link at the top of your listing. This then helps potential customers to your site see what the page is about and encourages them to click through to your site.
However, we often see that the title tag of a page is changed by Google in the search results so you might have a title tag which is targeted to your keywords and services as above but when a search for something is performed in Google this title tag is changed in the search results. In their blog yesterday Google explained how this works to help people understand why their title tags don’t always show the same as what has been entered on the page.
Basically, Google has an algorithm which where they feel it is necessary makes changes to the title tag. This might be because the existing title is not seen as relevant to the search performed or because the title tag is missing from a page (which isn’t good for your SEO anyway). This is also done if the title tags on your pages are all the same or if they are too long. This algorithm contains many different signals to determine the title tag to display on these search return but Google don’t go into too much detail about what these signals are however, from experience these seem to be related to what people have searched for and the content on a page.
Generally the Title tags on your website are important anyway so to make sure that you are helping your visitors as much as possible you need to make sure that these are unique, none are missing and that they are descriptive of the content on a page. If you have missing or duplicated title tags on your site you can see this in the HTML Suggestions section of Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure your title tags aren’t too long. Generally the rule is around 70 characters although Google sometimes displays more now. Make sure that your title tags aren’t just the name of your page such as “Home” or “About Us” as this doesn’t help visitors work out what you actually do. When working on the SEO of client sites one of the first things that we look at is these title tags to ensure that they are optimised to help gain rankings and informative to visitors to your website.
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