The way Google generates titles and descriptions (snippets) for pages is a completely automatic process, taking into account both the page’s content and references to this page appearing on the web. The goal of those titles and snippets is to represent and describe the search result as accurately as possible and to explain how it is related to the user’s searched query.
And while Google doesn’t manually edit those snippets and titles for individual sites, Google always tries to make them as relevant as possible. You can improve the quality of the titles and snippets displayed for your pages if you follow the guiding principles outlined below.
How to Create Correct & Descriptive Titles
Titles are a critical element that provides users with quick insights into the content of a specific result and why it’s relevant to the query they searched for. This is usually the main piece of information that helps the user decide which result to click on, so it’s essential to use high-quality titles for your site’s pages.
Here are some tips for proper title management:
1. Provide a Title for Each Page
Ensure that each page on your site has a title defined in the <title> tag.
2. Write Concise and Descriptive Page Titles
Avoid using vague words like “home” for the home page or the word “profile” for a specific person’s profile page, for example. Also, avoid long and dull titles that use unnecessary extra words that are likely to be truncated in search results.
3. Avoid “Keyword Stuffing”
Sometimes it helps to have multiple descriptive terms in titles, but there’s no reason for the same words or phrases to be repeated several times.
Titles like “sunglasses, shades, sun eyewear, sunshades” might not be the best example, but you get the idea. Titles like this don’t assist the user, and this kind of keyword stuffing can make the titles look like spam to Google and users.
4. Avoid Repeating Titles
It’s important to maintain clear and descriptive titles for each page. For instance, if you use the title “Cheap Products for Sale” on every page of your e-commerce site, it would be impossible for the user to distinguish between different pages.
Different long titles that only vary by one word or one piece of information are not good titles either. For instance, titles like “
<band name> - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concertsA solution to this situation might be dynamically generating titles that better reflect the content on each page. For example, adding words like “video,” “lyrics,” only if the page actually contains such content.
Another option in this case could be using only the band’s name <band name> as a concise title and utilizing the page’s description (meta description) to describe the page’s content.
5. Markup Your Titles but Keep Them Concise
The home page title on your site is a reasonable place to include additional informative information about your site, like “Mingle – A Place for People to Connect and Mingle.” However, displaying this text in every title on your site will hinder readability and might appear repetitive when multiple pages from your site show up for the same query.
In this case, you might consider adding only the site’s name at the beginning or end of the title and separating it from the rest of the title using some separator like a horizontal line, a vertical line, etc. Here’s an example:
<title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.</title>6. Be Careful When Blocking Search Engines
Be cautious when blocking search engines from crawling your pages. Using the robots.txt directives on your site might prevent Google from crawling pages, but it doesn’t always prevent them from adding pages to the index.
For example, Google might index a specific page by following a link to that page from another site. In this case, when Google doesn’t have access to the content of the page, it relies on external content to create the title, like using the anchor text from another site. To prevent a page from being indexed, you would use the noindex directive.
That’s all.
