The code and the language that powers every website is called HTML. Without going into too much detail, title metatag is part of that protocol.
The good news is that you don’t have to know HTML as all content management systems or software used to create a website will have a module, a plug-in or other provision for you to insert this metatag to your website.
This meta-tag will be the heading when your website shows up in the search result. It is something we’ve all seen and here is what I mean below. It is a snippet of search engine results page (SERP).
What are the rules for my title meta-tag?
Being the title of your book (website), it is important to follow rules when creating a meta-tag and here they are:
- Title is less than 60 characters long including spaces. Google keeps changing rules on this, however if you keep it up to 60 characters you can pretty much be guaranteed that your whole title meta tag is going to show up in the snippet.
- Make sure that title tag captures searchers attention while delivering on its promise. This will increase your click through rate.
- Include as many keywords in title while still sticking to the previous 2 rules.
- Use capitalisation – it stands out and will also entice more people to click on your website.
If you were using WordPress and ‘All in One SEO Pack’ plug-in that I recommend, you would be entering your title tag by going to WordPress dashboard and then navigating to the page or post you need to add or change the title tag to. At the bottom of the edit page enter your title tag in the ‘All in One SEO Pack’ section as shown below.
An example of a good title tag as far as the text length was captured in our previous snippet example (second image up).
Here is an example of a title tag that breaks at least 3 if not all 4 rules that we outlined above.
It doesn’t use title casing and it is too long which is why it is truncated with ‘…’ at the end not showing the rest of the text.
