The text in each page’s title tag is what appears in the clickable link on search engine results pages. So, fixing and adjusting the words that are used (and appear) in a page’s title tag is one of the quickest and most effective adjustments you can make to influence not only that page’s ranking, but also the number of people who actually click on the link. Just as important, title tags, both individually and in aggregate, help search engines and searchers alike to understand what the website is about.

A title tag is a basic element of every online HTML page. In HTML code, a title tag is the first text in the page header. It looks like this:

So what goes into a title tag, anyway?

It’s hard to think of an example in which the name of the company, organization, or even the individual behind the website in question shouldn’t be at least a component of the title tag. A title should be inserted for every title tag on every page of the site, particularly if the site is commercial in nature. And as mentioned earlier, search engines place more weight on the words and phrases that appear on the top of a page than they do to the words further down. Therefore, most SEO specialists recommend that the brand or company name be the very first word or part of the first phrase in every title tag.

In terms of actual characters in the title tag, you don’t have a whole lot of leeway. Most experts recommend limiting title tag text to about 65 characters (including spaces). Otherwise, you risk your title ending with “...”. The various search engines occasionally adjust how many characters they allow to appear in title tags, but browser windows are just so wide. Limit text to 8–10 words, and you should be fine. And after a page is indexed, you can always check to see if the entire title tag actually appears as a clickable link.

Others argue that if the brand or company name is part of the site’s domain, the most important keywords or phrases should hold precedence.

Hopefully, your title tags are considerably less than the 65-character maximum.

Don’t limit your tags to the company name. Each page of a site provides a new opportunity for an individualized, highly relevant, keyword-rich title tag. By no means should you let that opportunity slip.

How would this work in practice? For example, the law firm, Stevens, Brown, and Partners, a law firm in Seattle specializing in litigation, might use any of the following variants for the title tags:

Note the use of separators, including hyphens, commas, colons, semicolons, arrows, and dividing lines in the text. These separators count toward the character allowance; however, they also help a searcher to quickly scan and comprehend the search result. The actual keywords that appear in the title tag will be heavily influenced not only by the content on individual pages, but also by the keyword research that’s gone into crafting the copy on site pages, as well as the target audience.

Are people searching for lawyer or lawyers, attorney or attorneys, law firm, or a combination of all these words? Keyword research reveals this information and, of course, helps to inform title tag construction.

Generic information such as “about” or “homepage” or “contact” reveals very little to searchers or to search engines about a page’s content or context. Just 5 to 10 seconds of thought is usually enough to help you come up with the right title tag. “About the law firm” or “How to contact a Seattle attorney” are both much more descriptive, relevant, and helpful phrases.

Our hypothetical law firm might be trying to attract clients in the Seattle metro area, or across Washington state (but not in Washington, DC, which is a very important distinction). These priorities and criteria help to shape title tag strategy and content.

And sometimes, if a long keyword phrase is particularly effective and relevant, it might be a good idea to chuck a brand or company name to get the longer title in, something along the lines of “Find an attorney for a personal injury lawsuit in Seattle, WA.”

All this being said, don’t get bent out of shape over title tags. There’s probably no absolutely perfect page title. Some might rank higher, whereas others might get more clicks. It’s a trade-off. You can always test and tweak title tag variations.

In title tags, as well as in keywords anywhere on a site, don’t forget that stop words don’t count toward SEO.

What’s a stop word? It’s one of the 500 or so most common words in the English language—so common, in fact, search engines simply ignore them. This includes words like the, and, is, from, to, always, never, and so on. Absolutely use these when necessary for end users, of course, but bear in mind that search engines are programmed to ignore them more or less entirely.

Never forget that title tags are just that: titles. It’s, therefore, probably not a good idea to title a site page before it’s already been written and optimized. The information on each individual page is one of the most important determining factors of what should go into the title of that page. If there’s so much information that you can’t determine what the title ought to be, it’s probably wise to rewrite the copy, or even to create two or more separate pages on the site, so both the copy and the title tags can be better optimized and positioned.