There are many SEO experts who discount the importance of the title tag when writing content or at least when publishing new web pages and blog posts, directly or indirectly, your title tag has an impact on your search engine rankings. Why is it so?
First, what is the title tag and how is it different from the heading?
The heading is the big text that you see when you visit a blog post or an article. It appears on the top. It tells you what you’re going to read. A heading can be used anywhere. It can be used with a blog post. It can be used with a YouTube video. It can be used with a landing page or a general information web page on your website. Here is how a heading looks:
Screenshot of a heading.
In most of the cases – at least in the case of my blog – the heading and the web page/blog post title are the same, but they don’t have to be. You can have a different title and a different heading.
What is the title tag?
The title tag appears in the <head> </head> section of your web page. It appears in the form of <title> </title>.
Here is the title tag screenshot of the same blog post above from where I have taken the heading screenshot:
Screenshot of the title tag.
Your web page title is the string of text that appears between <title> and </title>.
Why is the text that you use with your title tag so important for your SEO? As I have written above, there are many SEO experts who say that the title tag may not have any significance vis-à-vis your search engine rankings, but I personally feel that your title tag is one of the most important aspects of your web page or blog post in terms of usability as well as search engine rankings.
Above you have seen how the heading appears in the blog post and how the title tag looks like. You can view the title tag by viewing the source code of any web page.
How does the same blog posts appear in the search results? Below is a screenshot of the search engine listings are the same blog post:
Screenshot of the search engine listings of the title tag.
As you can see, the string of text that appears between <title> and </title> also appears as an enlarged hypertext in the search engine result pages. Is it appearing because of the keywords I included – “blogging roadmap” and “improve SEO”? Could be.
Personally I don’t know if the Google ranking algorithm takes the title tag into account while ranking websites, but there is a logical reason why the title tag is important when you are writing content.
Research by various SEO and digital marketing companies has shown that if the words used in the search string also appear in the listing as hypertext, a greater number of users click the link. Therefore, if someone has used both “blogging roadmap” and “improve SEO” in the search query and both these keywords or words appear in the search result as hypertext, there is a probability that a greater number of people will click the link.
This is called the CTR – click through ratio. If you have a better click through ratio, your search engine rankings improve.
When more people click the link, Google thinks that the link must be important to the search query being used, and hence, it should appear higher. As you can see, for the search term in the screenshot, the link to my blog post appears at the top.