Page titles for findability
Summary: Make sure your titles are descriptive and contain relevant keywords – help people find what they’re looking for and improve SEO.
Ensure titles are descriptive
Page titles are possibly the most important content element for findability.
How to: write titles
- Describe the content meaningfully
- Use keywords — preferably at the start
- Add the site name at the end
- Be concise — around 70–80 characters
- Make all titles unique
Remember, people can’t see your content when they’re reading your titles. So, your titles need to be descriptive.
Web page titles - where they are displayed
Every web page published online should have a title. The title isn’t visible on the page. It’s an HTML tag that looks like this:
<title>Your web page title is here</title>
Page titles act as a label and link to content in:
- search results
- social media channels
- RSS feeds
- browser history and bookmarks
- browser tabs.
And for social media sharing, you can use these meta tags:
<meta property="og:title" content="Your web page title is here"> <meta property="twitter:title" content="Your web page title is here">
Titles are often generated by your publishing system
Understand if/how your CMS generates your web page titles for you. Many CMSs use the <h1> content. Ask if you can edit the generated title to ensure it is effective as a standalone label.
Documents need titles too
Titles for MS Word documents are generated from the first words you typed in a blank document. If you are overwriting an existing document they can also be inherited from the original document.
Conversions from Word to PDF can inherit the document title from Word.
You need to check that the title is appropriate and edit if required.