Every so often, search engines change the way in which our websites are displayed in search results. Recently, Google enacted one of these periodic changes. This has created a bit of buzz around the topic of title tags – since they remain the main focus of any displayed feature in search results – and you may have some questions about the changes. In an attempt to get back to the basics of building the best title tags, we have explored the net for suggestions and recommendations on how to create great ranking title tags. You’ll find the summary of these findings below, which hopefully will shed some light on what you should be doing to build better site title tags.

Finding the Right Length

There is so much debate out there on just how long (or short) your site title tags should be. In essence, this tells us a lot – namely, that there’s no one correct answer. Since we can throw out any objectively universal answer, let’s look at some other parameters. For starters, a title tag that is too short will automatically be populated by information from the rest of your site whenever pinging to Google. While a title can also be too long and therefore obscured, it is better to have the title tag built around this element so that the user is tempted to click and find out more. It appears that in the most recent tweaks to Google’s title tag search display, the titles have been shortened by a few characters, so keep that in mind. Ultimately, the ideal title tag range appears to be in the 55 to 60 character range.

Anticipating Keywords

Whenever someone searches for a particular keyword, they may be searching with several words at once. Have you noticed that any word that is searched for will appear in bold if in the title tag or meta description of a page? Improving your title tags to (try to) take this into account will help improve the percentage of people who click on your pages in search results and will continue to help improve your rankings with Google and others. We’ve also heard that Google will be adding colour-coded features to paid search results in the coming months, which will help make your site title tags pop even more.

Building Organic Title Tags

We’ve heard a lot of discussion about what users are pinging to Google in the form of keyword relevance, but how does this impact your  title tags’ ability to reach people? As it turns out, there is some evidence that suggests you can garner more traffic by following the advice in the previous paragraph above for your meta data and focusing solely on good, organic title tags at the same time. You should strive to write a captivating, interesting title tag first and foremost, rather than optimize it for search engine optimization. When you create tags that are perceived well by those who do find them, the increased click through rates will boost your ranking with Google over time and help move you to the top of select search results.