What is a page title?
Page titles (also called SEO titles, meta titles) play a vital role in SEO. They help search engines determine what your page content is about.
When you can, always include your keywords in the title in a way it makes sense and sounds natural. When you search for something, the little snippet you see on the search results page looks like this.
A good page title can dramatically improve CTR (Click Through Rate).
Your readers make a decision whether or not they want to click on your page and read based on 1. Page title 2. Meta description 3. URL.
So it's important to have a title that grabs your reader's attention.
Some best practices for writing a killer page title:
- Include your keywords naturally, don't stuff keywords for the sake of it.
- Write titles for humans, not for SEO bots. If you only write for bots, you may end up sounding too robotic and no living breathing person will bother to click. If you don't get clicks, you'll have a terrible CTR, and Google will start promoting other pages that do get the click, inadvertently demoting yours. So always write titles for humans to read.
- Keep your page titles within 50-70 characters. If they are too long they may get cut off by Google. If they are too short, well you're missing out on ranking.
- Don't use generic titles such as Home page, About Us, Contact Us, My Services, get creative, entice the click.
- No need to append your company name or brand to the tile. I mean they already know where they are. They make your titles unnecessarily long.
- Capitalize each word of your title, it makes them stand out.
- Use this tool to check how your page titles appear on SERPs.