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<title>Page Title Optimisation | Nurdic</title>
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Using Page Titles for Search Engines
Within the context of onpage optimisation or internal ranking factors, the Page Title is the single most important element for search engines in determining what the landing page is about. Thus, the decisions on the use of particular keywords over others within page titles have major implications for organic search visibility, rankings and performance.
This stresses the importance of the wording of page titles to be first and foremost driven by keyword research, where such aspects as organic rankings, search volumes, keyword difficulty, estimated click-through rate and estimated traffic are taken into account in selecting a string of keywords over others. Over time, the keyword strategy for page titles can be enhanced by web analytics data, comparing actual organic traffic, engagement and conversions resulting out of the keyword optimisation efforts.
Lastly, in highly competitive SERPs, the strategy may leave some scope to evolve, incorporating organic intelligence aspects, where additional factors like SERP features and competition metrics are used to further optimise the page titles.
Using Page Titles for Users
Having the most weight for search engines in determining what the Landing Page is about, the Page Title is, by design, also shown to users at the decision point of click-through to the Landing Page. Namely, it is the top visible element in SERPs, on social media platforms and in web browsers. A good Page Title encourages users to click through to the website by offering a both holistic and explicit picture of what the Landing Page is about.
Depending on the website’s ability to outrank its SERP competition, the Page Title targets the head terms of the Landing Page, which brings the additional benefit of these keywords being featured in bold when they are part of a search query the Landing Page is shown under. Although this may seem insignificant at first glance, users have learned to associate bold keywords with a match to their search query, which makes them pay greater attention to the title ahead of their decision on whether the Landing Page is likely to satisfy their search intent.
Furthermore, the more long-tailed the search query is, the more likely the users are to rely on these strings of bold keywords to make their click-through decision. In an SEO context, two secondary uses of Page Titles come in the form of posts on social media platforms as well as browser tabs and bookmarks. As a general rule, social media platforms pull the same page title a search engine would use. However, websites that are heavily reliant on social media may have some scope to use supplementary Page Title tags aimed at social media platforms in particular to take full advantage of their unique context and technical specifications, such as title lengths.
Writing and Structuring Page Titles
Before sitting down to write your Page Titles, if there is one important point to be made on optimising titles, or other onpage metadata, it is that optimising a website to rank for twice as many keywords can be just as effective or ineffective as it would be to optimise it for an even smaller amount of highly relevant keywords. It is only a fraction of users that are going to reach the conversion stage and under usual circumstances the time spent on blindly capturing organic search market share is probably better spent on understanding the website’s user base in increasingly more detail.
If your website is focused on a particular topic or market, chances are, you’re going to have a solid idea of what the titles of all your web pages are going to look like. However, it is easy to underestimate how much more value you can offer users by simply understanding the wider demand of the market and the granular implications it has over various uses of keywords and the user intent behind them.
Without a doubt, the choices of which title versions to choose should be first and foremost based on Keyword Research, as there is no better way of formulating your titles than by directly linking them to the existing demand in the market. Furthermore, having done all these things just right, over time certain universal patterns begin to surface that can take your optimisation efforts a step further. Getting them right from the beginning can bring some marginal benefits to the performance of your SEO:
- Namely, it is generally believed that when the meaning behind two versions of Page Titles is identical, the version featuring the most important keywords at the beginning should be preferred to that featuring them at the end. The reason behind this is that a search query that features its’ most relevant and specific aspects at the beginning is likely to rank marginally better for those keywords, compared to the same search query using them at the end. An additional benefit comes in the form of what is often described as offering users unique value at first glance, or to put it simply, featuring the important aspects of a Page Title at the very start of the title to give users clues of what a page is about – early.
- Secondly, this can also be balanced against the optimal use of Title lengths. Depending on the authority of your website and its ability to rank in organic search results, you may also consider the length of your titles as an important factor that may influence your rankings and click-through rate.
- In the case of smaller websites with limited authority in SERPs, the best bet is to go after the long-tail search queries which are plentiful in number and are less competitive (with less competition coming from highly authoritative websites). Thus, web pages of less authoritative websites can and often do establish rankings for multiple long-tail search queries, the cumulative search volume of which can, over time, outgrow that of head terms (main keywords), the SERPS of which are overcrowded with powerful competitors over long periods of time. The main strength of small websites lies in the fact that they can react to micro-market trends more promptly, occupying positions in the market at a time when it is of limited interest to the big players.
- On the other hand, well-established high authority websites are often better off focusing on the main market trends, trying to capture as wide a search neighbourhood as possible. The goal here shifts from answering every search query with the highest possible accuracy to building an online brand authority that users can rely on for high-level information which brings the benefit of engaging users with the brand early in their decision-making cycle.
Optimal Page Title Lengths
In order for the Page Title to display fully in SERPs, as opposed to it being truncated and replaced with ellipses, its length should be within the limits of 561 pixels. The actual number of characters can and will vary for each page title, as some characters are wider and are spread over more pixels than others.
This allows only for an estimated number of characters to be used in the planning phase for writing and scaling of Page Titles, which can be as low as 50 and go as high as 70. As a general rule, 90% of Page Titles under 60 characters will display fully. However, to ensure each page title is displayed fully in search results, one must consider the default pixel width measure of 561 pixels.
Case-sensitivity; Acronyms, Nontraditional Characters;
It is generally considered that the use of CAPS in page titles does not directly influence rankings. However, caps are significantly larger in size and thus occupy more pixel space. It is considered acceptable to capitalise the first letters of the words used in Page Titles, but it comes down to personal preference. On another note, the text written fully in caps will stand out among the other search results and while this will likely draw attention, it will also associate it with SPAM. Nonetheless, the use of caps shouldn’t be discouraged as long as it serves a purpose other than drawing attention, as in the case of acronyms.
In fact, W3C recommends the use of abbreviation tags to indicate what they stand for, page titles not being an exception to this. Although search engines have learned to associate the abbreviations with their corresponding meaning, less common examples or those that may have multiple interpretations could still use disambiguation through the use of the HTML abbreviation tag.
Similar logic applies to the use of nontraditional characters, which should generally be discouraged unless they serve a purpose which couldn’t otherwise be explicitly communicated. The main reason behind this is that users can spend as little as a fraction of a second on reading any given Page Title and the presence of special characters adds an additional layer of complexity that demands additional attention from users.
Frankly, the easiest way to determine if a nontraditional character is welcome in a Page Title is to compare how important it is to have it up and how many users it potentially turns away. A secondary tier of reasoning to this is linked to the fact that most special characters require encoding, some are reserved for special technical purposes and some are even deemed unsafe, which occasionally results in broken code.
Synonyms, Keyword Variations and Keyword Modifiers in Page Titles
Although search engines are getting increasingly better at recognising the meaning behind words, synonyms and keyword variations not being an exception to the rule, niche examples may not always be as evident to a search engine as they are to an industry specialist. Nonetheless, the use of multiple terms, whether synonyms or variations of the same keyword, in page titles should only be allowed if they, in fact, target the needs of the user at that first moment of exposure to the page title in SERPs. Otherwise, they may be better suited as part of the meta description or body content, at a later point in the user journey.
Keyword modifiers are a select number of words used as extensions to the head keywords most often utilised to target long-tail search queries. The selection of keyword modifiers should be initially made by such keyword metrics as search volumes and keyword difficulty. At a later stage, once the landing page starts receiving traffic, the use of keyword modifiers can be further refined based on onsite user engagement and conversion rates.
Keyword Stuffing as part of Page Title Optimisation
Keyword Stuffing can be broadly defined as the practice of using keywords anywhere on the website that have the intent of misleading Search Engines. Over time Search Engines have learned to recognise such practices and penalise the websites that use them.
As the Search Engines continue to evolve and get better at recognising the use of Keyword Stuffing, in the future the use of any keywords that are aimed to appeal to Search Engines at the expense of the user are likely to be identified as such. It may be worth noting though, that at current times websites are very unlikely to get penalised by search engines for simply using the wrong keywords, only those using such Keyword Stuffing practices at scale are likely to find themselves in trouble.
The activation of Branding in Page Titles
Another generally favoured practice is the use of the brand name in page titles for Brand Awareness as much as Brand Positioning, where over time consumers assign authority and relevance to websites based on the search neighbourhoods they are shown under. For the reason that the Page Title is the top element in SERPs for any given landing page displayed alongside 9 other organic SERP competitors, over time it has become the element that can take the most advantage of the branding factor to influence click-through rates and organic traffic at large. Ensuring that the brand name is shown and is fully visible at the end of the Page Title in SERPs may positively influence organic traffic in several ways:
- Positively affect click-through rates of first-time visitors who are more likely to initiate an online interaction with a source that can be easily identified by a name and thus could be held accountable, at the very least in the consumers’ minds, for the trustworthiness of content.
- Positively affect click-through rates of returning visitors who are more likely to rely on a source of information they have previously interacted with and thus have a formed expectation for their authority and trustworthiness.
- Positively affect the branded search for similar queries, which in the long haul may and does influence the organic rankings for those same or similar search queries, performed without the mention of the brand.
Missing or Duplicated vs Unique Page Titles
Naturally, for all these factors to be applied to Page Titles, they have to be specified in the first place. When Search Engines index and show Landing Pages in search results that are missing the Page Title, they will pull a snippet of text from the page at hand. While the snippet replacing the Page Title may occasionally be fit for purpose, it is most commonly less so than a purposefully specified one.
Another important factor is the uniqueness of Page Titles on the website. A Page Title is considered unique when it is unique to a Landing Page on a given website. As a result of automatically generated pages, duplication is a common resulting issue. Search Engines will generally assign less value to pages with duplicated titles but still rank one or multiple versions. In many cases, Search Engines will rewrite the Page Titles, when they’re duplicated or deemed not relevant to the Landing Page they represent. As a general rule, if the Page Titles follow the above guidelines, they are likely to be indexed exactly as they are.
Duplicated Page Titles based on Pagination
An additional step to the implementation of pagination may sometimes come in the form of modifying the page titles of any pages following the root page (page 1) in a manner that makes clear that these web pages are part of a sequence. In other words, simply adding the page number to page titles. Search engines representatives have spoken on this topic, qualifying this practice as an overkill, and it is.
If you still hold the preference for giving users a better context about the page being part of a sequence, this should be evident from the URL, which in the case of pagination created by parameters can be optimised for readability. Alternatively making this point in the meta description can go a lot further, as making your potential visitors aware of the page being part of a sequence should not come at the expense of the page title’s real estate.
Page Title Tags for Social Media
Page titles are also displayed on posts shared on Social Media. Each Social Media platform will have its own lengths for titles, some allowing more content to fit inside them compared to search engines. This is where the use of a Protocol called Open Graph comes in. While the Open Graph protocol won’t work with all the social media platforms out there, it is by far the most commonly used one.
It may be worth noting that Open Graph allows websites to make specifications on how their content will be displayed on Social Media, which can get quite granular and include anything from the appearance of simple elements like the title, description and website name and go all the way to the appearance of images and music controls. However, what is great about Open Graph is that making a change to a Page Title for Social Media platforms can be as simple as adding the code snippet below.
<head> <title>Page Title for the Web | Nurdic.com</title> <meta property="og:title" content="Page Title for Social Media | Nurdic.com"/> </head>
Changing Page Titles in WordPress
Now that you’ve understood all the aspects of writing successful Page Titles, what you’d likely want to do next is actually be able to write them or change them directly in WordPress.
Editing Page Titles in WordPress
There are a number of ways of editing Page Titles in WordPress. Let’s begin by exploring how to edit the Page Titles without actually opening the Page or Post you want to edit the Page Title for. Chances are you’re working on a big website so in certain situations editing the Page Titles directly from your “All Pages” or “All Posts” menu can come in quite handy. Just open your “All Pages” or “All Posts” page in WordPress, search or navigate to the Page or Post you want to edit and Press “Quick Edit”, then “Edit the Page Title within the “Title” field.
Next, if you’re writing a new Page or Post, you’ll most definitely want to edit the Page Title straight away. From the “All Pages” or “All Posts” page within your WordPress search or navigate to the Page you’d like to edit the Page Title for and click “Edit”. Click on the “RankMath” icon in the top right corner of your screen. You will then see the following:
Once you’ve clicked on the “RankMath” icon in the top right corner, you will see the following screen, just displays your current Page Title, Page URL and Page Meta Description, the way they’re visible in Google Search. Just click “Edit Snippet” to be presented with the editing controls.
Once you click “Edit Snippet” you will reach “Preview Snippet Editor” which will looke something like this and which will allow you to fully edit your Page Title, Page Meta Description and URL slug.
Important Remark on Page Title Writing in RankMath
Please note that if you’re using RankMath, the first method of editing the Page Title from within the “All Pages” or “All Posts” page in WordPress won’t work. This happens because RankMath has priority over the normal way of writing the Page Titles, Meta Descriptions and URL slugs. This means that if you’ve installed RankMath, you must adhere to the standard of always writing your Page Titles, Meta Descriptions and URL slugs, directly using this last method.
It may also be important to note that RankMath will always display within your “Preview Snippet Editor” exactly how your Page Title and Meta Description will look like in Google SERPs, including if they’ll be truncated.