Technical information about the document

Here is the main content of the site, articles that have titles in the tags:

Title of the site or article

site content

So the Title tag is the title of the HTML document/page. It can be said that it refers to technical information about the document. This information is hidden from the eyes of users directly on the site, but all browsers and search engines use it.

How do browsers use Title?

If you look to the left top corner browser, you will see information about the page on which this moment you are. If you look at a browser tab and move your mouse over it, you will also see information about the page. For example, I took my article about SEO titles:

Everything I've highlighted in yellow in the image is the information contained inside the Title tag.

How do search engines use Title?

For search engines, the Title tag is also of great importance. This is the first information that a search engine receives about the content of a page. After all, we remember that the title is located almost at the very beginning of the document, and all search robots index pages from top to bottom.

Because this is the very first information you receive search robot about our page, we should try to indicate in the title tag the most important, most accurate definition of further content.

But that is not all. The search engine also uses the contents of the title tag in search results. When a user asks a search engine a query, the latter provides a response in the form of links with descriptions to resources that answer the user’s query.

If we look at the page of the found site, we will see a different header:

Those. The search engine shows us the information contained in the title tag, while the title of the article in the h tag may be completely different.

Now the fun begins. Because The page title is used in search results; it is an indicator, both for search engines and for users, of the usefulness and quality of the resource found.

What does indicator mean? If the title is uninformative, then when viewing the search results, the user may not click on the link and go to your site. In the opposite situation, if the title is overloaded unnecessary information, then the user may also not want to go to your site. It follows from this that the title should be very accurate information, responding to the user's request.

I won’t say that the example is perfect, and all SEO is based on nuances and it’s impossible to say anything with 100% confidence, but let’s try to figure it out (clickable image):

So, I highlighted the more attractive links in red, respectively the title. From the first words I can judge that the site sells what I need and I am more likely to click on these links first. Although, of course, I cannot say that these titles are ideal, because... still overloaded with information that is unnecessary for me. The same goes for links highlighted in blue. Why do I need an article or, for example, the brand may not be important to me at all. The presence of such information disperses my attention and can also serve as an obstacle to progress on this request.

I highlighted the most unattractive title in gray; it is longer than it should be, so it was cut off by the search engine in the results. Due to the large number of words, which are essentially a list of everything possible, the title looks very unattractive. I can't immediately determine whether they are selling exactly what I need.

Having considered these examples, we can draw conclusions about what the title should actually be in order to serve as a faithful assistant in promotion, be attractive to users, encourage them to click on the link, and also carry the most important information.

How to effectively use title for promotion

It is clear that the title must contain keywords, but it is important to ensure that the keywords are as close to the beginning as possible or even so that the title begins with the keywords. This will not only improve the click-through rate of the link, but will also make it easier to promote queries.

You can use the same keyword twice in the title. For example:

HTML title tag - effectively use the page title title.

In the example, the title keyword appears twice.

The title should not be a set of keywords, but should be a meaningful phrase.

It is very important to avoid punctuation marks inside the title that are placed at the end of the sentence. The fact is that search engines take into account passages in the text.

A passage is a complete thought. Those. Each of our sentences is a passage. All words that are inside the sentence are taken into account search engine, as a single whole. As soon as we put a period, we separate the previous words from the next ones.

Therefore, it is very important not to separate your key phrases with punctuation marks that indicate the end of a sentence - period (.), question mark (?), Exclamation point(!). Let's compare two headers:

HTML title tag - effectively use the page title title

HTML title tag. Effectively use the page title title.

In the first case, for example, my article can be found by phrases:

• html page title
• page title tag

In the second version, such key phrases will no longer work. There is a period between the words, separating one passage from the next.

It is worth paying close attention to the length of the title; not everything is simple here either.

Firstly, despite the fact that it is recommended to keep within 80 characters, when calculating the title directly in the search results, maximum length There are just over 60 characters. It is likely that the search engine takes into account 80 characters in the title, but always cuts off the long title in the results. It’s also worth considering that a cropped title looks less attractive than an uncropped one.

Secondly, it is worth considering the density of the title. The more words it contains, the more the title’s significance is distributed across all the words that are in it. Accordingly, the fewer words, the more weight they acquire in the eyes of the search engine.

Therefore, try to create concise headings that reflect the essence of the page, but bright ones. This will not only improve your rankings in search engines, but will also increase your click-through rate.

It follows from this that it is worth optimizing the page for one or two related queries so that the title has maximum weight.

In this regard, the title structure

|page title|

preferable to

|Page title|Site name|.

For a long time I used the title structure from the second option, but now my title contains only the page title/article title.

By observing these simple rules, you will be able to promote more effectively and attract more visitors from search engines.

P.S. Someone might think, what does the bread have to do with it in the picture? Bread is the head of everything, title is as important in website building and SEO as bread is in our lives :).

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Today I want to go into a little more detail than I did in the article about website promotion, to dwell on meta title tags, description and keywords, which have been factors influencing the success of web project promotion for more than fifteen years.

But are they really that useful for your website? Or maybe they are the reasons for the vegetation or very sluggish progress of your Internet project? I will try to answer this question in this article.

When writing this material, I took into account not only my experience, but also the experience of specialists considered authoritative in this field (for the most part, they were included in my list). Reintroduce you to .

Also, for many questions and terms encountered, I will refer you to more detailed materials, so as not to waste your and your time. Well, now let's quickly begin to resolve the intrigue - why a title can be dangerous?

Are title, description and keywords meta tags important for SEO?

So, in order to understand the train of my thoughts and not get lost, you need to start from the beginning, namely from the distant 90s, when the “great and terrible” meta tags (read about) appeared for the search engines available at that time. At that time, the idea that came to the mind of Larry Page (one of them) of using the most relevant to the request entered by the user into the search bar.

This means that the main factor by which the search engine solved the problem of relevance (compliance of the document with the question that the user asked the search engine) was the analysis of the text for the content of words from the user’s request. Not only the density (frequency of use) of the keys in the article was taken into account, but the content was also considered with all passion meta keywords tags, description and especially the title.

It is from those very distant times that the belief comes that these very meta tags are the key to success in promoting your article. But this is far from the case, and even more than that, everything has turned upside down. They may be the cause, or they will simply put a spoke in the wheels when trying to promote it. Why is this happening? Let's try to figure it out.

All this mess in code might look something like this:

... ...

Actually, you will need to know the syntax for creating a description, title and keywords mainly only for the formal purpose (well, or if you are creating a static site on Html files).

If you create a project on the (site engine), then you will be given the opportunity to simply fill out the form fields, after which this content will be inserted into the title, description or keywords in the web page code. But this is not the point, because we are not talking about details (more on them below in the text), but about global things - why these innocent things can be a killer factor for website promotion.

So, initially these meta tags were supposed to serve a good purpose - make life easier for search engines to identify the pages that are most relevant to the search query. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If an idyll existed for some time, it was only until competition for the Top results appeared (traffic comes mainly only from the first page of search engine results for any), and the very presence of a resource in the Top did not directly affect the benefits received its owner.

Widespread spamming of description and keywords meta tags began, and the title also suffered. When ranking, search engines were no longer able to rely on factors that could easily be cheated, and gradually the meaning of the words included in the description and keywords was completely leveled(perhaps not to zero, but very close to it).

For some reason, search engines did not dare to act so harshly with the title. The words contained within this miracle tag are still of paramount importance in ranking, but relatively recently even this tenet of promotion (which lasted about fifteen years) has become less unshakable.

Description and keywords - meta tags that do not affect rankings

So, let's make an interim summary. Can Keywords be thrown in the trash? Well... Probably not. Personally, I try (if I remember) to write down the keys in it, but only those that are most often found in the article. The fact is that they have almost completely ceased to have a positive influence on promotion. But Keywords is still capable of shitting all the raspberries. Search engines have not yet abolished the punishment for spam in meta tags.

What's the description? Everything is not clear here. Why? Again, spamming keys in it can negatively affect your promotion. Why is it needed then, if the keywords are contained in it? are not taken into account when ranking, but can cause harm at the same time?

The fact is that the contents of the description by the Google search engine can quite often be used as a resource, especially at first. For example, my recent article about Google results on request “translit” looks like this:

This is not the entire text from the description, because Google and Yandex only take into account a certain number of characters (you can count it yourself, but they usually focus on 150 characters including spaces):

I said that the snippet is most often generated by Google in this way, but Yandex sometimes also does not neglect this opportunity. All for the same request “translit”, the snippet in its output again so far consists of the words contained in the description of this web page:

As you can see, in the resulting snippet from both search engines, the query keywords (which I also used when writing the description) were highlighted in bold, which somewhat increases the chances of a transition to my site, because attracts additional attention to the ad.

This is the main purpose of description for website promotion - the snippet created by a search engine based on it should attract the attention of users and encourage them to choose your resource to go to.

Whether or not the description you wrote will ultimately be used as a snippet is a different question. Your job is to write it down with the obligatory mention of keywords, as well as intriguing and exploiting curiosity content users (within 150 letters).

However, this meta tag is only one of many ways to tell search engines what text they should use as a snippet. Moreover, this method is not the most reliable and does not give any guarantees, but it is simple and straightforward - you just need to get used to always filling out the description fields before publishing an article.

It is clear that if you are in the Top for the request “ plastic windows”, then you will use the entire arsenal of ways to influence the snippet (for example, this one), because this can result in simply fantastic amounts of profit due to the increased CTR of your ad (coupled with the title). But I personally am content with only the mandatory filling out of description, and also keywords (a bunch of them, but now I’ve already given up the latter, because that’s okay).

Title decides who will be in the Top and who...

What is the main difference between Title and Description? If you overspam keywords in all three meta tags, you can seriously pay by losing positions in search engines. This unites them and makes them a rather dangerous tool in the wrong hands.

But the Title (page title) has one difference. If you don’t include the other two meta tags, then it’s okay by and large will not happen, but if you forget to write a title for a web page, then most likely it will will not participate in the search, i.e. will not be added to index().

Another thing is that almost all CMS automatically generate a title from the title of your article, and the ability to manually change it is usually provided optionally (for example, using appropriate extensions). Therefore, only owners should take care of its mandatory registration.

But the mere presence of a completed header on absolutely all pages of your site does not make a difference. Exists whole line nuances that must be observed automatically when composing texts for titles and which can greatly influence both positively and negative side on .

Moreover, it should be noted that this tag performs two very important roles:

It is precisely from taking into account these two concepts that one should proceed when composing the optimal text of the title. This could be the end of the conversation about him, but not everything is so simple. Let's try to chew all this in detail and pay special attention to those mistakes that can lead to fatal consequences.

Let's start with the impact of the title tag on ranking (from the webmaster's point of view, on promotion):

1. As I already mentioned, the main condition for successful promotion should be the presence of headings for all web pages of your site. No title - no search traffic.

Second an important condition is that this tag should be used in the web page code only once and only inside the Head container (and not Body). In general, the CMS (content management system) you use should be responsible for this, but it doesn’t hurt to check that it’s working correctly. To do this, just look at the source code of any page on your site and make sure that the title tag is present and correctly inserted into this very code.

You can view the source code of a site page by right-clicking in your browser and selecting context menu « Source" (in Opera), or "Page Source Code" (in Firefox), or "View Page Source Code" (in Google Chrome), or "View HTML code" (IE).

2. Headings for all pages of your site should be different from each other (be unique). It is quite difficult to achieve this in practice (for example, for me, home page has pagination and these same numbered subpages cannot boast of unique titles), however, for those pages that you promote, this rule must be observed. A large number of pages with the same title tell search engines that this site is similar to GS.
3. The order of keywords inside the title tag is also taken into account by search engines (mainly Google), so it is important to place the most frequent keywords at the beginning (he will tell you about this), and then in descending order of frequency. Implementing this task in practice is not so easy, because the page title must remain readable and, if possible, attractive.

Some CMS (for example, Joomla 1.5) by default form the page title from the site name that comes first, and only then add the title of the article. Following logic previous paragraph, you can’t do this, because you worsen the ranking (promotion) of your resource (you can find links to materials in the article about). Although famous specialist According to Seo, he refutes this principle with his example:



An exception to this rule may be made for famous brands, one mention of which can be an incentive to click on an ad (for example,).

4. Lately Yandex and Google have become sometimes don't use title as a site title in search results. Most likely this is the answer to the fact that this tag does not or does not fully reflect the content of the article. From here we conclude that the words you display in it must be completely relevant to the text of the web page, otherwise the search engine will distort everything to its own taste and color.

Most experts advise limiting title length a certain number of characters (about 70), but personally I don’t always adhere to this rule, because I can’t create short headings. In principle, Yandex can select fragments with keywords from this tag of any length, which allows you to optimize the article for a larger number of queries. It won’t look like ice, but it’s quite acceptable, in my opinion:



True, Google, unfortunately, does not know how to do this and the user may not see the keywords from his request at all in the title of the ad for my blog:




5. There is one more point that I personally do not implement when compiling titles for my blog. By default, in many CMSs it is formed from the text of the article title, which will most often be enclosed in . Because the presence of keys in H1 is a ranking factor in itself (although not as powerful as the title), then it makes sense to write the title of the entire page slightly different from the title of the article. I personally don’t do this (it breaks), and in my H2 tags they live, not in H1.

   In WordPress, they usually use . to write unique titles, but in Joomla, as described in the article about .

6. In general, it is very important not to overdo it. On the one hand, brevity is the sister of talent, but simply listing keys in a title can lead to dire consequences (lower rankings or even the page being completely removed from the index). On the other hand, in order to reduce its size, it is advisable to use less empty (stop) words (conjunctions, particles, pronouns), which cannot in any way affect the ranking. All in all, we need to look for a middle ground.

How to write a title that exploits curiosity

A little higher, we looked at the technical aspects that primarily affect the successful ranking of your documents (their promotion). But so far we have only talked very superficially about the second task that Title performs. I'm talking about creating a catchy headline that can very significantly increase the frequency of clicks on your ad in Yandex or Google search results (ctr).

It won’t be very easy to implement all the tips described below in practice (I can’t do it), but if it works out, then this may eventually happen. The idea is to make the page title (title) not only meet all the requirements described above, but also be able to arouse curiosity in the majority of users who read it.

So, let's look at the basic principles of creating headlines that can awaken one of the most powerful driving forces of cognition - curiosity. In order to satisfy his interest, the user will be able to read your article from cover to cover, the main thing will be to maintain the interest throughout the entire article and not disappoint the user at the end (do not cross the line and do not stoop to).

Most of all, users are most curious about titles (title, among others), the statements in which challenge established concepts. This will be especially effective for the reader who is familiar with this topic, but your title breaks the stereotypes he has formed and it begins to seem to him that he probably doesn’t know something (missed something, didn’t take into account, or there is some secret , which he does not know).

The desire to figure it all out flares up, and that’s what you needed. An example, probably, can to some extent be the title of this article (a test of the pen, so to speak).

So, in the way described above, you create some confusion (discord) in the reader’s head, thereby trying to stimulate him to read your article. But it's not that simple. Many readers will be on their own (people tend to evaluate their knowledge, as a rule, higher than it actually is).

They will assume that they already know what your article is about. You need to write the title so that they understand that you know what they know, but in the article you will talk about something still unknown to them.

Well, it would be nice if the text of the article corresponded to the title that was compiled with such difficulty. Each paragraph should maintain intrigue and curiosity, quietly answering the reader's questions.

In general, it is clear that the matter is dark. If you have talent, then using these tips you will be able to create a catchy title, but if you don’t, then you won’t succeed (like me, for example).

Good luck to you! Before see you soon on the pages of the blog site

You can watch more videos by going to

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The Title tag is the title of the HTML document. Title is almost always used in search engine results. At the moment, it is very important for classic SEO and for attracting attention on social networks.

The main purpose of the Title tag is an accurate and concise description of the content of the page.

This element is very important as for users(when they decide whether to switch to this page from search results), and for search engines(one of the important factors is determining the relevance of a page to certain search queries).

Optimal title tag structure

home key phrase– minor key phrase | Brand name

Optimal length for search engines

Google usually displays the first 50-60 characters, or as many characters as will fit in 512 pixels. If all your titles are 55 characters, then you can expect about 95% of pages to be fully rendered.

But, search engines may choose to display other text: the title in the results can be changed

• for your brand
• custom request
• or for any other reasons (for example, keyword spamming)

Why is the title tag so important?

Title has long been considered one of the most important factors among internal factors ranking (most important: page content) and it appears in 3 places:

1. Browser. Appears at the top of your browser + in your bookmarks.

2. On search result pages. When you use keywords in the title, search engines will highlight them in search results if the user has performed a query with those keywords. This gives the user more reasons to click on your link.

3. On external sites. Many external sites, especially social networks, will use the title as an anchor link to your page.

For example, this is what it looks like on Facebook:

Now let’s figure out how best to optimize and write the title on your website.

How to properly optimize your title

• Always remember the length

As mentioned above, search engines will shorten your title if you exceed the threshold. But, on the other hand, this length is not a very strict rule.

Since long headers can perform significantly better at getting traffic from social networks. And also, even if some keywords were not displayed by the search engine, this does not mean that they do not take any part in the ranking. Therefore, it is advisable to make the title as natural and clickable as possible, but you can sacrifice length.

• Place main keywords at the beginning

According to experiments and our experience, the closer the key phrase is to the beginning of the title, the more weight it has in ranking. In addition, the likelihood that the user will click on our link in the search results increases.

• Strengthening by Brand

If your brand is well known in your target market, then in such cases, it needs to be placed in a visible title area so that users pay attention to it in search results. In other cases, it is better to add the brand at the end of the title tag.

• Readability and emotional impact

Creating an attractive title can help significantly increase the number of clicks from the search results. When you're creating headlines, it's important to think about the entire user experience beyond SEO and keyword usage.

Tools that can help with title optimization

In order not to wait for what your page will look like in search results, but to immediately receive maximum effect, we recommend using the following search results simulation services:

As a result, you can see what the title looks like in search results:

Finally

The title tag is equally important for both end users. Using well-constructed and unique titles for all pages of your site will help you rank higher in search engines.