Title Tag Optimisation for Blogs: What?, Why?, How?
Title tags are one of the key components of optimisation process, and have a significant potential to improve the performance of a web page on three key areas: Usability, SEO and Social Sharing. (Search Engine Journal, 2018) This article, particularly, will focus on title tag optimisation for blogs in the search engines context. The importance of page title tags for blogs and how to optimize them effectively will be key subject headings.
What Is A Title Tag?
A title tag is an HTML element that appears in the head section, and describes the title of a web page. See. Figure 1.
Figure 1. Code Sample of a Title Tag
It provides the first signal about what the content, and the context of a web page are about. When a search query is performed, title tags are displayed in search engine result pages (SERPs) as blue, clickable text lines, and in browsers’ tabs as simple text lines. See. Figure 2. Google displays first ~ 60 characters of a title tag in the search results page. (Moz, 2019)
Figure 2. Title-Tag Display in Google In addition to providing the first signal about the relevancy of a web page’s content to users, it is one of the important elements that Google considers to determine the relevancy of a page regarding a specific search intention. Thus, page title optimisation has a significant impact on improved ranking performance in Google. Why Title Tag Optimisation is even more Important for Blogs?Search engines consider two key elements when ranking a web page: Quality and Relevance. Quality is more depended on external factors (e.g. Domain Authority, Backlinks), whereas relevancy is a more manageable and democratic factor for content creators. When a personal brand-new blog is created, external quality factors such as low domain authority, and difficulty of receiving quality backlinks are some of the main challenges that impact the page’s ranking, and therefore its traffic. Additionally, the number of existing blogs, 600 million currently, indicates that mass majority of blogs are personal, which typically have lower or no advertising budgets compare to blogs belong to brands. (GrowthBadger, 2019) A survey by Responsive Inbound Marketing (2018) revealed that, amongst the top bloggers, only 20% use paid content promotion. It is also worth to mention that due to high number of pages they have, big brands usually use automated systems to generate title-tags. Amazon has 293,000,000 pages in Google’s index. See. Figure 3. Figure 3. Number Amazon Pages Indexed in Google. Therefore, SEO, especially on-page optimisation practices to improve the relevancy of a blog page, is even more important for blogs, and page title tags has a significant role to improve a blog’s relevancy for its potential users and Google. As it is discussed above, the first benefit of page title optimisation relevancy which has an impact on a page’s ranking performance. Secondly, it is the first information that a web page possibly communicates to its potential users after a relevant search query. Therefore, it is the first opportunity to convince people to engage with the blog and generate traffic. Since, when determining page quality, Google also considers how a webpage is successful at converting users after a relevant search query (See. Click-Through Rate), well-crafted and convincing title tags have also potential to improve the performance of a blog on this metric, and gain advantage at ranking. How to Perform Title Tag Optimisation?
When optimising title tags there are some simple rules to practice to improve the SEO performance of a blog page or any web site.
How Long A Page Title Length Should Be?
Page titles which exceed ~ 60 characters are truncated when displayed by Google. Therefore, long page titles have a potential risk to fail at delivering the message given in titles fully and clearly. See. Figure. 4 As a results, truncated page titles typically cause lower Click-Through Rate. (Search Engine Journal, 2018)
Figure. 4. A Truncated Page Title. For mobile, page titles word limit can extend to ~ 80 characters. (Search Engine Journal, 2018) However, due to the larger size of certain characters (e.g. W, O) number of characters may vary. Therefore, the way page titles are displayed should be check by preview tools and in Google after applying them. See. Figure 5. Figure 5. Display of Page Titles with Wide vs. Long Characters How to Decide What to Write in A Page Title?Keywords Research for Title Tags
Before start writing a title tag, it is important to perform a keywords research. This is due to what a web page says and the quality of content are important, but not enough to be found by a specific target market. How it is said, in web page context how it is written, has also a significant impact on reaching searchers who show signals of interest for a topic. Therefore, performing keyword research, and revealing how people search about this topic, is one of the key steps of page title optimisation practices. Tools such as Google Keyword Planner and SemRush are some alternatives to start with.
When performing a keyword research for a page title tag, focusing on topics in addition to a main, and usually a generic, keyword is also a strategy to consider. This is because pages typically do not only rank for their “focus/head” keyword, but also rank for related variations and terms. (e.g. long tail keywords) Especially for blogs, due to quality factors, high supply, and competition level, it may take long time to rank for a main keyword. Therefore, in addition to one primary keyword, targeting long-tail-keywords has potential to generate traffic relatively in a shorter period of time. (Hardwick, 2018) For Google, “Keyword Ideas” within the Keyword Planner tool can be used to craft this strategy. A Clear, Descriptive, and Convincing Title
As page titles are important signals to users and to search engines about the idea of a web page, they should be descriptive, convincing, and clear. Thus, the chance of both being found and clicked would increase.
Differentiating Title Tags from Domain Names
An important point to note is that a title name should be different than the domain name to increase the credibility image of a web page both for search engines and potential visitors. (Search Engine Journal, 2020)
Unique Title Tags
Writing unique title tags is another important point to consider for optimization. This is simply because search engines ignore copied titles tags, and display some other part of the web page’s content as page title. Title-tags should not only be different from titles used by other blogs and websites, but should also be unique for each page within a website. Google Search Console or on-page auditor tools are useful to avoid this issue. (HubSpot, 2020)
The Negative Impact Of Keyword Stuffing
Revealing “the best keyword” does not mean using it and its variations repetitiously in a title-tag would help to improve the performance of a page on ranking and/or traffic. Contrarily, Google consider such title tags as spammy, and they are more likely to be perceived as less trustworthy and more click-bait. (Search Engine Journal, 2020)
Conclusion
The importance and the fundamentals of writing a page-title, especially for blogs, are discussed in this paper. However, there are still many variables, facts, statistics, trends and tips to consider when writing a page title such as call to actions, curiosity factor, formatting etc. that require further research and readings on the topic. (BuzzSumo.com, 2017) Every search has an intention. In terms of relevancy, the search engine performance of a blog heavily depends on how successful its content at answering a specific search intention. The reason search intention is a ranking factor for Google is because relevancy is what searchers value. As title-tags send a significant signals about the content and the context of a page, and are usually overlooked by many blogs, title-tag optimisation practises give potential opportunities to gain advantage in search engines.
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2 Comments
Asena
4/8/2020 01:11:12 pm
Informative and helpful, would like to read about it more
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Sumesh.S.Das
4/11/2020 09:52:45 am
Nice work
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