Google Official SEO Guide - 2 Create unique, accurate page titles
Content
- Introduction
- Create unique, accurate page titles
- Make use of the “description” meta tag
- Improve the structure of your URLs
- Make your site easier to navigate
- Offer quality content and services
- Write better anchor text
- Use heading tags appropriately
- Optimize your use of images
- Make effective use of robots.txt
- Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
- Promote your website in the right ways
- Make use of free webmaster tools
- Take advantage of web analytics services
- Helpful resources for webmasters
2. Create unique, accurate page titles
A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.
The title of the homepage for our baseball card site, which lists the business name and three main focus areas
If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results (If you’re unfamiliar with the different parts of a Google search result, you might want to check out the anatomy of a search result video by Google engineer Matt Cutts, and this helpful diagram of a Google search results page.) Words in the title are bolded if they appear in the user’s search query. This can help users recognize if the page is likely to be relevant to their search.
The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business and could include other bits of important information like the physical location of the business or maybe a few of its main focuses or offerings.
A user performs the query [baseball cards]
Our homepage shows up as a result, with the title listed on the first line (notice that the query terms the user searched for appear in bold)
If the user clicks the result and visits the page, the page’s title will appear at the top of the browser
Titles for deeper pages on your site should accurately describe the focus of that particular page and also might include your site or business name.
A user performs the query [rarest baseball cards]
A relevant, deeper page (its title is unique to the content of the page) on our site appears as a result
Good practices for page title tags
- Accurately describe the page’s content - Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.
Avoid:
- choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
- using default or vague titles like “Untitled” or “New Page 1″
- Create unique title tags for each page - Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
Avoid:
- using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages
- Use brief, but descriptive titles -Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.
Avoid:
- using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
- stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags
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