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A page title is a short title for a webpage that appears in the browser tab and in search results. The page title describes the content of the page and helps users decide whether to click on your website link. It’s sometimes called a Title tag, Meta title and SEO title.
The page title summarises what a page is about and makes it simple for a user to understand at a glance:
Best electric cars 2024 | What Car?
Web browsers use these page titles at the top of each tab:
Example of a page title used in a browser tab
Almost all search engines display page titles and descriptions — you can refer to both as metadata — in the same way, almost going as far as having near-identical colours for page titles links and meta description text.
Example of a page title and meta description
Why are page titles important?
Page titles are an important part of SEO for two main reasons. Firstly, searchers will decide whether or not to click on your website in the search results based on the appeal of your page title. Here’s how the page title appears in Google search:
By writing attractive and descriptive page titles, we can increase the possibility that they will be clicked, resulting in more website traffic.
Secondly, Google uses the content of the page title to understand which search terms a page might be relevant for. So it’s a good idea to make sure your page title includes your target keywords.
How long should a page title be?
If your page title is too long, it’ll get truncated when shown in search results. Google cuts off page titles longer than 600 pixels on desktop, which typically equates to around 70 characters. On mobile, page titles longer than 60 characters are often cut off.
For that reason, we recommend writing your page titles to be less than 60 characters.
How to write the perfect Page title
As an SEO agency that has written many tens of thousands of page titles over the years, here are some of our top tips on writing the perfect page title:
- Make your page titles unique to each page. Don’t be tempted to copy and paste – remember, your page title should describe the content on your page!
- Use your primary target keywords in your page title, preferably towards the start. These will be the words or phrase that your audience is looking for, so show them quickly that this page is relevant to their search.
- Hit the right length. Around 60 characters means they’re likely to be shown in full on both mobile and desktop.
- Make them descriptive but attractive. Think: if I was searching, would I click on this page title?
