Do Title Tags Affect Ranking
When it comes to SEO and putting together the perfect strategy for your business, you may be wondering – do title tags affect ranking? Knowing and understanding how Google ranks pages is a must if you want to improve your website visibility. So let’s delve further into this topic and find out just how important SEO title tags really are.
Understanding Title Tags
In order to understand whether title tags affect ranking, you have to have a firm grasp of what they are and where they appear, as this will allow you to analyse your existing strategy and make any necessary tweaks. Essentially, a title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. A page’s title is displayed as part of the search snippet for any given query. It appears as the clickable headline for the search result and can also be found in the browser title bar. What you write for the title is therefore highly visible.
Are Title Tags Still Important for SEO?
Google’s main job as a search engine giant is to provide the most relevant content for any given search. Therefore, it’s really important for SEO marketers to make it really clear what each web page is about. This is where title tags come in. Google unquestionably uses the HTML title tag to understand what pages are about so it can rank them in search results. Therefore a title tag should give an accurate and concise description of a page’s content.
To take things a step further, your title tag strategy can be tailored to the type of searches people make to find your brand. If you’re getting multiple hits from specific keywords or search terms then you can incorporate these into your title tags – so long as they’re relevant for the content on the page. The last thing you want to do is mislead your audience in a search as this will lead to high bounce rates which could ultimately damage your rankings.
What Does Google Say?
If you’ve already noted ‘title tag as a ranking factor’ as part of your SEO strategy, you’re on the right path. But what does Google have to say about title tags and how much of an impact do they really have on search engine results? Well, Google’s John Mueller commented:
“Titles are important! They are important for SEO…Of course, they are definitely used as a ranking factor, but it’s not something where I’d say the time you spend on tweaking the title is really the best use of your time.”
He went on to explain that while title tags are used as a ranking factor, helping Google to understand what a page is about, they are not the most ‘critical part of a page’ and are not going to drastically influence what is seen on the SERPs.
Mueller said, “…if you’re talking about ranking changes so strong that you’re seeing them overall, then I think just tweaking titles and meta tags are not going to give you what you’re looking for. Tweaking titles and meta tags makes it easier for us to recognise what is actually on a page, but it’s not going to change the overall visibility of the website significantly.
So the main takeaway here is to make sure your title tags describe the content of the page well. This should improve clickthrough rates – especially if your tags are deliberately tailored to your target audience. But don’t lose sleep over making tweaks. In fact, where tweaks are needed, Google often does this job on your behalf. Let’s find out more.
Google Changes Your Title Tags for You
Did you know that Google rewrites page titles more than 60% of the time? That’s right. Google’s algorithm is so powerful and clever, that if your title tag isn’t cutting the mustard, it’ll simply rewrite it for improved relevancy. Google will rewrite title tags that are too short or too long. The ideal length is around 50-60 characters, so you don’t want to be writing an essay. According to a recent study of more than 2370 websites, the search engine also changed page titles with brackets 77.6 percent of the time and completely removed the words between the brackets 32.9 percent of the time. So it’s not in your interest to use this form of punctuation.
If you’re looking for SEO services that can help to improve the ranking of your website, contact Whitefish Marketing today, an SEO agency based in Kent.
