In our previous article which was SEO # How does google treat 404 and 410 http errors? we discussed how Google treats the 404 and 410 errors and how you should handle them. Today we will like to discuss on how we can control the title of our page which google uses for search.
The main thing to know in this context is How does google use the title or generate the title for your website when displaying your page in the search results. To better understand this first you have to know that google uses alot of factors to generate the title of a web page. It first, looks at the <title> tag of the page and if the content of the page matches the title tag or not. Google also checks if the query being used by user to search has relevancy with the text in your title tag. If all these match then the text added in the title tag is displayed on the search results.
The next thing Google checks is the <h1> tag and the text written in the <h1> tag. To know the importance of the H1 tag please read our previous article which can be found at: SEO # What is importance of H1 HTML tag for SEO?. If the content of the H1 tag is more relevant to the content of your web page and the content in the H1 tag is also more relevant to the query being used by the user to search than H1 tag is used as the title of the search result.
The next thing Google checks is the actual content on a web page. If the title tag and the h1 tag do not match the query being used then some content from the web page matches than that content on a web page will be used as the title tag.
The next thing Google may use is the open directory project and use the data available with the open directory to generate a title for the web page. Therefore it is important that you submit correct information to the open directory project and be patient, do not resubmit again and again or your website will never be added to the directory.
The next thing Google may see is the links pointing to your web page and see the title being used by those links and text being used by those links to link to your web page.
The above process will make it clear to you that all that really matters is the user’s experience and how well a user searching for a particular item be shown the best possible search results. You will also notice in the above process that it also helps your website because if a user’s sees relevant title according to the query they used for search they are more likely to click on the link, then on a link which shows irrelevant content.
How you can control the title is a very difficult to answer, because there is no set criteria for titles as explained above. All that you can do is analyze what the user is going to search for on google and make the title tag content relevant to that and also relevant to the content of the page.
Do not over think about this and be obsessive that you need to control the title tag. Keep your title tags as short as possible and also keep them relevant to the content of the web page. Also make sure you put in a h1 tag in the page and put in relevant title for the same. Using a correct title and h1 tag is really important for your SEO and website endeavors because title on a search result is the 1st thing a user sees and it is the only thing which compels users to click on the link. The more irrelevant content you will put in your title and h1 tags, the lesser are the chances of the page getting good rank and lesser are the chances that user’s will click on your link on Google.
We will keep updating our SEO Tips section every 4 days, please subscribe to our feed and also share our articles on Facebook and Google Plus so other’s can benefit from our insight. Please feel free to send us your comments below, on how we can improve.