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Day 1 - Title tags

Title tags

We’re starting with the title tag because it’s the first thing any visitor interacts with when they land on your website (or even before, title tags are how your site is listed in search results).

The title tag affects all visitors, it is like the subject of an email, it is the signal to someone while looking at a search result listing, a shared URL preview, or what is read to a screen reader user before they start interacting with your content.

A title tag is short but descriptive. We won’t get into all the nuances about what makes a search engine optimized title tag here but instead how to check the title tag of any page on your site to ensure they are unique and descriptive enough to provide the right amount of signal for your visitors.

Task

  1. Open the homepage of your website
  2. To view the full title tag, view the source for the page in the browser (this can be cumbersome to do for each page, I’ve included one of many browser extension below, SEO META in 1 CLICK, which make this process easier)
  3. Review the title tag and adjust if needed
  4. Move on to another page on the website.

Example

Screenshot of SEO report showing a summary of tags on the page, most notable is the title tag with double copy in it

Example meta information from web page

By checking one of the sites I oversee (example above), notice the title has double “Wayne State University” in it? These types of unintentional system-style oversights are too easy to miss if they aren’t reviewed every so often.

Ideally, the order of information in a title tag starts with the most important to the most broad.

[Specific to only this page] - [Specific to a section of the site] - [Site-wide title or company name]

Tools

Further resources