Title Tag

Page titles used to get filled with a company name or a menu label. Inside the site that reads fine — Home, About, Pricing are perfectly clear while you're looking at them.

The problem is that the line has to stand alone in a search result. Someone searching decides which of about ten entries to click on the basis of that one line. If the words they typed aren't in it, they read the page as unrelated to their question and move on. A page that took months of writing to reach the first position can still bring in very few people for this reason: it's visible and nobody clicks it, which no ranking report will tell you.

One per page, written in the document's head, and the value gets used in search results, the tab, and link previews alike. Four things to settle.

1. Front-load within the length. Search results show a fixed width, so anything past roughly 60 characters gets cut. Put the load-bearing words early enough that a truncated title still makes sense.
2. Lead with the term you're targeting. The output of keyword research, choosing the words people actually search, lands here. The brand name usually goes at the end: people who already know you search by name, and people who don't search by the problem they have.
3. Write a different one for every page. Identical titles across pages leave a search engine unable to decide which to show. Page 2 and page 3 of a list sharing one title is the common version of this mistake.
4. Keep it consistent with the body. When title and content diverge, search engines discard the line you wrote and pull a different sentence from the page instead. Once that starts happening regularly, writing titles stops accomplishing anything at all.

The summary beneath the title in the same result is handled by the meta description. It isn't used for ranking, and together the two decide the click-through rate from search.

"This page's title is identical to the home page's."

The same title is attached to several pages, so the engine has to guess.

"Move the target term to the front and put the brand name last."

Reorder it so a searcher sees the relevant part before the truncation.

"Search results are showing a different sentence than the one we wrote."

The title diverges from the body, so the engine is rewriting it for us.

A Pagedeck guide about meeting notes reached third position in search and still brought in very little traffic. The title read "Meeting notes feature overview | Pagedeck," and Ravi rewrote it to match what people searching that phrase expected: "How to write meeting notes, with a template | Pagedeck." The ranking didn't change and the click-through rate went from 1.9 percent to 4.3.