Title Tag: how to optimize it?
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What is a Title Tag?
A Title Tag represents the title of your web page. It is an html tag located in the head and used by search engines to interpret the content of your web page. The writing of your Title Tag is a fundamental step in your positioning strategy, its optimization will influence both the natural referencing of your site but also increase your conversion rate (click).
Be careful not to confuse the Title Tag with the H1 tag! The Title Tag only displays your title in the page tab and in the search engine results!
Title Tag and SEO
The objective of the Title Tag is to indicate to search engines (Google, Baidu, Bing, Qwant, Yahoo!, Yandex…) the main theme of your page. Also, defining a clear and efficient Title Tag (choice, placement of keywords…) will facilitate the understanding of your page by the search engines and will allow them to better position your page in the search results (Search Engine Result Page or SERP).
How to optimize your Title Tag?
Your Title Tag will be read by search engines to index and position your page in SERPs, but also by Internet users. Your optimization strategy must find a balance between your SEO actions (choice, placement of keywords…) and your marketing issues.
Here are some points and recommendations to optimize your Title Tag:
- In the SERPs, your Title Tag will be limited by the search engines in pixels and not in number of characters. Count about 150 characters (spaces and punctuation included) to display your entire Title Tag.
If you exceed this limit, search engines will automatically cut your meta title, you will lose the original meaning of your meta title and you may discourage visits to your page.
- Your Title Tag corresponds to the title of your page, so make sure that each Title Tag is different, especially on your dynamic pages.
Pages with an identical Title Tag should not coexist, their presence will influence the indexation and the positioning of your site!
- Your Title Tag is a fundamental point in your referencing (or paying) strategy so take the time to think carefully about the choice of your keywords. Place in your Title Tag only the keywords that will be present in your page (slug, titles, content…). Search engines as well as Internet users must immediately understand the theme of your page and make the link between your Title Tag and its content. Moreover, an over-optimization of your Title Tag can be penalized by search engines.
To facilitate the understanding and indexing of your page by search engines, I invite you to include your Title Tag in the slug/url of your page!
- The indexation of your page by search engines takes time so as soon as your page is published and your Title Tag optimized, I recommend you to send a request (or a new request if you have made changes) via the search engine console (Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools…).
During your optimization, if you modify your Title Tag and your slug, don’t forget to check the possible 404 errors. I also invite you to follow the optimization of your page via Google Analytics.