Plain Language Page Titles: More Important than Ever
Government Web pages are found mainly through search engines. Google recently redesigned its search results page and there are quite a few small, but impactful, changes in this latest redesign. Specifically, it affects how page titles are displayed.
Many experts now recommend even shorter page titles. Below are a couple of articles (plus tools) to see how the change may affect your page titles:
Page Title & Meta Description By Pixel Width In SERP Snippet
New Title Tag Guidelines & Preview Tool
In addition to the suggestions offered in our previous article on Achieving Good SEO, here are a few specific tips for page titles:
- Place page titles in a
<title>tag within the<head>. - There’s no magic number, but around 55 characters or less is good.
- There’s no set syntax, but “Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name” is good.
Below are a few articles on optimizing title tags for search engines:
- Nine Best Practices For Optimized < title > Tags
- Title Tag
- Title: the most important element of a quality Web page
If you’re interested in learning more about search, register for our Search Is the New Big Data (in-person training) on April 10.
