HTML Title Tags: The Basics, Benefits & Best Practices

The title tag is one of the fundamental elements of any webpages. Using titles in the right way offers many benefits and no disadvantages, yet so many sites still misuse them & suffer as a result.

This article explains the basics of title tags & then shows you how paying some attention to your own titles can benefit you. It finishes by offering 6 simple best practices to follow when setting up your own title tags.

What’s A Title Tag?

The title tag is (or should be) an element of every webpage. In HTML code it looks like this:

Take a look at the titlebar on any site & you can see the current page’s title tag. Here it is in Internet Explorer:

And here it is in Firefox:

What’s The Use Of A Title Tag?

The primary functions of a title tag are:

1. They appear at the top of your pages
2. If your visitor bookmarks a page, their browser will (by default) use your title tag as the bookmark title
3. Visitors moving back/forward through their browser history will navigate using your title tags

Title Tags & Search Marketing

Title tags also have a few ’secondary’ functions. Search engines & other users will make use of your title tags. Understanding how/why they do this, & how this impacts search results, allows you to use them to your advantage.
Ensuring each of your titles is highly relevant to the page it appears on has three large search marketing benefits:

1. The title tag is used in most search engine algorithms as an indicator of what the page is about, meaning you should use the words in your title tag that you’d like that particular page to rank for
2. When other sites link to yours, they’ll often use your title tag as their link text. Inbound link text is one of the key factors in deciding which terms you rank against. (eg. get 100 inbound links with ‘kitchen’ in the link text & you hugely increase your chances of ranking for that term).
3. The title tag is used as the linked ‘headline’ in search results, for example:

It’s worth noting that most search engines (including Google) will embolden terms matching the current search. (eg. the above example was a search for ‘OM Strategy’ & so each instance of those terms appears in bold)

Best Practice For Title Tags

1. Include your name/company name either at the beginning or the end of the tag (I prefer the beginning)
2. Include the most relevant keywords specific to each page where possible, without sounding spammy
3. DON’T just use a site-wide standard title tag. Use unique titles on each page so that A) visitors who have bookmark your page can easily see which page they’ve bookmarked; B) it’s easier to navigating back/forward through your site in the browser history; C) search engine visitors can see what the page is about, not just what the site is about
4. Keep the most important info in your title tags within the first 66 characters (Google currently chops them off at around this point)
5. If you’re providing information, think of your titles as you would newspaper headlines or email subjects: quick snippets that will appeal to search engine users & bring them to your site
6. If you’re selling products, think of your titles as you would ad headlines on a busy magazine page: Let readers know you have the product they want, include a price if you would in any other ad. If you’re in a crowded market, test out extras such as ‘In Stock’, ‘Free Delivery’, and monitor the results.