The most common mistakes when writing title tags

Title tags are an important part of every web page. But they often aren’t given the attention they deserve. Not only are they important for SEO and can play a role in your page ranking higher, but they also play a role in increasing the click-through rates of your pages in Google. The more enticing your page titles are, the more likely people are to click on your page rather than a competitor’s.

Yet most business owners don’t spend a huge amount of time writing page titles. They add a keyword or two and then don’t think twice about them. But it’s clearly worth spending the time and effort to create high-quality page titles.

Writing them isn’t easy, however. It’s easy to make mistakes. Here we reveal what the most common mistakes are and how you can fix them.

Adding Home to the title tag

A lot of business owners think that their homepage has to have the word “home” in the title tag to make it clear to everyone that this is the home of the website. The truth is, neither Google nor humans need to be told they are on the homepage. Normally this is very obvious. Google can even tell by looking at the sitemap. Instead, business owners should write a homepage title tag that reflects what that page is about specifically, rather than just calling it “home”.

Title tags are too long

It is possible for your website’s title tags to be too long to be effective. That’s because search engines will only display a certain number of characters. At the moment, Google currently displays about 70 characters of a title tag. If your page title is over 70 character, Google will cut it off mid-word and replace the remaining words with ellipses.

No keywords in the title

Title tags are an important part of on-page SEO. Google uses them as one way to work out what your page is about. But if you don’t use keywords, you are missing out on an opportunity to improve your rankings. Identify what the best keywords are for each page and add them to the front of the title tag.

Giving every page the same title tag

Believe it or not, some website owners use the same title tags on every single page. Usually, this is just the name of the company or some other non-optimized word or phrase. This is even worse than not adding keywords to your title tag. At least in that situation, the page titles might be descriptive. But when they are all the same you make it hard for anyone —Google or humans — to figure out what your pages are about.

Titles have too many keywords

Of course, you can have too many keywords in a page title. Some website owners think that the more keywords they add to a title tag, the better chance they have at ranking for all of these keywords. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. By stuffing keywords in the title tag you make it less likely that you will rank at all. You will also make it less likely that anyone clicks on your links in Google because the page will look spammy.