What is a Title Tag?
A title tag is the ‘technically defined’ title of the page and a required element for a HTML document. The title tag is one of the most important on-page elements for SEO and is often displayed on search engine results pages (SERPS). The title tag is strong indicator of what the page is about for both robots (search engine spiders) and also human visitors.
What is it used for?
Similar to on-page elements such as a H1 tag, the title tag is primarily used to tell visitors what the page is about. This is just like any real world document you might produce. The title tag is used by search engines to display the title of the page in SERPS and you’ll also see it being used at the top of your browser or browser tab. Additionally, many other 3rd party websites and applications make use of the title tag. For example, social networks make use of the title tag alongside a snippet of the page when a URL is shared.
Title Tags For SEO
It becomes very obvious to see the how optimising title tags can be beneficial to SEO activities. The title tag is an important indicator of what the page is about and so it’s essential the tag includes the keyphrase your page is optimised for. The keyphrase should appear at the start of the title tag (or as close as possible) which gives the keyphrase priority in the title. When writing title tags, consideration must be given to the length of the tag as search engines will only display titles of a certain pixel width.
At Herdl, we always try to include company and brand names in title tags across the websites we optimise in order to develop brand awareness. This isn’t always necessary but taking into account the human experience always helps improve click-through rates. As such, thinking about overall readability is highly important.