5 Attributes Of A Good Meta Title Tag

Meta title tag is one of the most important element of a webpage and a key location to reflect your target keyword(s). That being said, I see people crafting meta tags that are spammy and are not quite what is required. While you need to reflect the keywords in the Meta title tag, it doesn’t mean you need to stuff it with your keyword(s). Making it unnatural and spammy is the worst thing you can do to a Meta title. This would destroy your rankings in longer run. This would result in lower click-throughs for your website listings in search engine results. This post aims to educate about optimization of Meta title tag in today’s SEO context.

What Is A Meta Title Tag?

Before we go discussing tips to craft better meta title tags, let us first recap (understand; if you do not already know) what a meta title tag is. A meta title tag is – a HTML element that describes an online document. The meta title tag appears in 3 key spots –

• search engine results page
• web-browsers
• social bookmarking websites (most would usually use the Meta title tag for linking)

Here is a screenshot of the Meta title tag in SERPs (marked in red) –

5 Attributes Of A Good Meta Title Tag

A good meta title has following 5 attributes –

As evident from the graphics above, a good meta title tag has following 5 attributes –

1. The Meta title tag should include your keyword. A correlation research has established that websites that placed their keywords towards the beginning of the title tag perform better that their competitors. Adding the keyword to the beginning of the title tag is recommended. Say if you have a furniture website and your keyword is ‘discount furniture’ then having a Meta title like – ‘Discount Furniture Varieties By XYZ.com‘  would be considered apt.
2. The Meta title tag should be concise and should not be more than 70 characters (including space).
3. Every important keyword used in the Meta title should be actually present on the document of the page. I have seen websites where the page would not exactly reflect the title as required. Say for instance – your title was ‘Discount Furniture In New York – XYZ.com‘ and then the words ‘discount‘ and ‘New York‘ doesn’t appear in the text content of the page. This is a big No-No!
4. Every page on your website should have a unique Meta title tag. Ensuring that the same Meta title tag is not being used by your competitors is also crucial.
5. Most people would be stuffing the keywords (separated by separators like comma or semi-colon, etc.) in their Meta title tag. This results in making your webpage look spammy and also reduces your CTR in search results. Ensure that your Meta title tag is sentence-like and natural.