Learning SEO Series – Title Tags
Here is the first post in my Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Beginners series. This first post will look at the title tags of your website.
What are title tags?
The title tag is a piece of code on your website placed in the “head” tag of your site. It places text in the ‘tabs’ of browsers and is also used for SEO.
The title tag should be around 69 characters, stuffed with keywords and different on each page. It could be longer than this but then you risk that it is truncated when displayed on search results pages (see further down).
What are the other benefits of title tags
Title tags can also help the visual design and the usability of the website.
Take a look at this website. It’s a nice looking site, I’m sure you’ll agree but let down by the title tags.
In their title tag they have ‘HERE FOR THE BEER’ which is great but then ‘Homepage’.
They might as well of not put anything in this place as ‘Homepage’ is pretty much useless, unless someone is searching for ‘Homepage’ but are really interested in Yorkshire Beer.
This is how it looks in the search engines.
How do I fix this?
If you want to change your title tags you mean need access to your code. If you have access simple change the line between these tags found in the HEAD section:
This alone, should help your SEO but if you want to know about more ways to get further up the ranking, look out for our next post in this series.
