What Is a Title Tag and How Should You Write One
A title tag is the HTML element that names a web page: <title>Your Page Title</title>, placed inside the document’s <head>. Browsers show it on the tab, and Google uses it as one of the sources when it builds the clickable headline of a search result, which Google calls the title link. Writing one well means describing the page accurately and specifically, in words a searcher would recognize, with the most important terms first.
How Google Builds the Title Link
The title you write is an input, not a guarantee. Google’s documentation on title links in Search says their generation “is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page and references to it that appear on the web.” The same page lists the sources Google draws from:
- the content of the
<title>element - the main visual title shown on the page
- heading elements, such as the
<h1> - the
og:titlemeta tag - other large, prominent text and other text on the page
- anchor text on the page and the text of links pointing to the page
- WebSite structured data
That list explains why the title tag and the visible headline should agree. If the <title> says one thing and the <h1> says another, Google has two competing candidates for the same result.
How Long a Title Can Be
Google does not set a character limit. The title link documentation states: “While there’s no limit on how long a <title> element can be, the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.” The practical consequence is about order, not length: put the page’s subject and its distinguishing detail at the start, so that if the end is cut on a narrow screen, what disappears is the least important part, such as the site name.
The same documentation also advises against “unnecessarily long or verbose text,” so a long title is a problem of clarity before it is a problem of display.
Writing the Title
- Describe this page, not the site. Google’s guidance warns against vague titles such as “Home” for a home page or “Profile” for a person’s profile page. A title should tell a searcher which page they are about to open.
- Give each page its own title. Pages built from one template can end up with identical or near-identical titles, which leaves neither readers nor Google a way to tell them apart.
- Lead with the subject. A product page can open with the product name and model; a guide can open with the question it answers.
- Use a term once. Google’s SEO Starter Guide puts it directly: stuffing a page with keywords violates Google’s spam policies. A few descriptive terms help; repeating the same phrase does not.
- Decide where the brand goes. On inner pages the site name can follow the subject after a separator. On a home page, where the brand is the subject, it can lead.
- Match the page’s language and script. Google has written about how it generates titles when the title’s script or language does not match the page content, a case that comes up on multilingual sites.
Why Google Rewrites Some Titles
When the title tag does not represent the page well, Google may build the title link from other sources on the list above. The title link documentation names the most common issues it sees:
| Issue | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Half-empty title | Part of the text is missing, leaving only something like the site name |
| Obsolete title | A page reused each year whose title still shows an old year |
| Inaccurate title | The title no longer matches what the page now contains |
| Micro-boilerplate | A group of pages shares one title that omits what distinguishes them, such as a season number |
Each issue has the same fix: rewrite the title so it matches the current, specific content of that one page. There is no markup that forces Google to use your title, and Google has to recrawl the page before it notices a change.
Checking Titles Across a Site
On a small site you can read titles page by page. On a larger one, two tools help. A crawler such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider exports every title in one pass, which is how template problems show up: missing titles, duplicates across many URLs, or a whole category sharing one generic title. The Search Console Performance report, filtered by page, shows the queries a page appears for and how often it is clicked, which points to titles that describe the page in different words than the people searching for it use.
Before You Publish a Title
- Read it next to the page’s
<h1>and opening paragraph: do all three describe the same thing? - Search the site’s title list for the same text on another URL.
- Check that the first few words name the subject, not a generic phrase, and on inner pages not the brand either; on a home page the brand can lead.
- If the page carries a year, a season, or a version, confirm the title shows the current one.