Trends in Title Tag Design

Michael Garrity — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 20:00:00 GMT

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of title elements when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). The title of your website or Web page as it appears on a search engine results page (SERP) is an important factor when it comes to how well you ultimately end up ranking.

For those unfamiliar, title elements (or “title tags,” as they’re sometimes referred to) is the text that describes an online document, and they appear in the top of a browser, in the SERPs and, may often be used by other websites as anchor text.

The title element is often referred to as the most important aspect of on-page SEO, as it is the first thing that both search engines and users will see about your page – and we all know that first impressions are everything.

Best Practices for Title Elements

It is necessary to create descriptive, relevant title tags for your website and Web pages. In particular, you should be sure to include as many keywords as possible (while still sounding natural), as search engines will highlight those terms in the SERPs by bolding them, which helps increase visibility and, thus, click-through rates, as well.

However, when coming up with a title, you need to be aware of the length restrictions, as search engines will only show upwards of 70 characters. You should also include keywords as close to the front of the title tag as possible, and put branding (company name, etc.) at the end of the title, so that the keywords are given prominence. There is an exception to this, though; if your brand is well-known, and the name itself could be considered a keyword, you can (and probably should) put the branding up front.

Most of all, it’s important to remember that a good title tag is brand-focused, original and action-oriented. With that in mind, let’s look at the title elements of some of the best brands on the Web over various industries (retail, media, finance, lifestyle, technology and service providers) on both Google and Bing.

Retail

When you’re a huge name in retail like The Home Depot, all you really need to do (apparently) to bring in consumers is make sure that your website is clearly identified with your brand name. However, for a lesser-known company like Vistaprint, it is important to include keywords about the kind of products or services you can offer for users that may not be searching for your brand name.

Media

There are a whole lot of different media websites on the Internet, so the best way to stand out is to use a keyword-focused title tag that tells users exactly what kind of information your site offers, just like TMZ and Forbes.

Finance

Both Capital One and Investopedia know that their brand names are going to be the main way that users search for them on the Internet, so they put those first in their title tags. Then, each of them gave a short, succinct description about what services their sites provide to users that include relevant and highly searchable keywords, especially in Capital One’s case.

Lifestyle

Ancestry.com offers one of the best title tags, as it places all of its relevant keywords at the front of the title and makes the whole thing a bit more actionable by saying “at Ancestry.com,” rather than simply including the site’s name at the end of a string of keywords. The much more popular NFL brand, knowing that it’s name alone will be search for often, only has to include it’s name, but it makes sure to do it twice, just to be safe.

Technology

Major companies like Adobe and Microsoft don’t really have to do much more than include their names in their title tags. Adobe takes a the minimalist approach and just puts its branding in there, while Microsoft also adds some additional information that indicates to users just which Microsoft website and Web page (out of the hundreds of possibilities) they’re looking at.

Service Providers

The title tag for WebMD is all about branding, as more information-oriented searches will lead users to specific Web pages on the site; so, in lieu of adding all of the different services that WebMD offers, the site has opted for a cleaner title and put that additional information in the meta description area, instead. On the other hand, Kelley Blue Book’s title elements include all of the company’s most important keywords.

SEO Meta Data Mechanics: Titles & Descriptions

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:15:00 GMT

Inbound links and personal connections carry the strongest influence in search results listings, and today you will discover several tactics to increase both of those counts.

There’s a lot more to securing first-place and first-page rankings, however, than links and personal connections. For that you’ll need to delve into the mechanics of SEO and specifically the meta-data of your individual pages. We’ve analyzed the top listings and drawn some conclusions to help your website dominate the search results pages.

Meta-data was once the single-most important factor in placement (well, that and the type and quality of content on the page returned by the search engines), but no longer. Now meta-data has been deprecated in importance – but it’s still important. Specifically, the title tag and description tag are key, and the best part is that it’s completely under your control.

There are some general best practices as they relate to meta data. For example, it is imperative that each page feature unique (not replicated elsewhere) titles and descriptions. Another best practice is to write for readability and the optimal user experience – meaning it should be descriptive and appealing to users. Finally, since there is limited virtual “real estate” on search engines’ results pages, the length of titles is limited (so we’ll look at that too). Also worthy of note is that Google in particular does not always return the description that is available on the website, but often returns a content section from the page that most closely matches the users’ specific query. That being said, there are times when the description is used – so we’ll look at that as well.

These “best practices” are easier said than done, of course. But by looking at the search results pages periodically, and, more specifically, at the first-page results (and the first few listings), we can gain an idea of what’s working – or at least what’s most important to the search engines.

To conduct our test, we were logged out of the search engines as it should be obvious that the role that personalization plays today is far too influential in the modern search experience. With our setup in place, let’s hit the SERPs – we’ll look at Google and Bing independently.

Search Engine: Google

Keyword Phrase: Romantic Valentines Ideas
Some general thoughts on the sites in the top ten listings before venturing into the details. Overall, the design of about half the sites were in violation of Google’s recent page layout algorithm. Personally, I found about half of the content below average (and, believe me, I need the help!).

That evaluation aside, just two of the sites were using the maximum allowable length for titles on Google. The average title length of the ten sites returned was 44 characters with spaces. Just one site on the search results page for this query did not have either the title or description provided on the site. The maximum description length on this query was 160 characters (with spaces) and the lowest was just 80 characters. The average description length was 138 characters.

Search Engine: Bing

Keyword Phrase: Romantic Valentines Ideas
In my opinion, Bing actually did a better job of providing a more universal search experience. The first listing was actually a section dedicated to news (one primary listing, two secondary listings – titles only), and had a section dedicated to related images. Also, unlike Google, Bing provided its related search area under the second organic listing. Finally, Bing featured an indication of the freshness of results with two that were indicated as published within the past one day.

Every listing on Bing used the title provided by the website listed. Just one of the ten sites returned (consequently, a Google Blogspot site) featured the exact description provided by the site. The average title length on Bing was 45 characters (with spaces) and the average description length was 136. Five listings used the maximum allowable description length, and just one listing used the maximum title length.

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