Meta tags perform several essential functions:
- They affect the page’s display and its position in the index (output).
- They help to promote the resource according to the most relevant queries of your target audience.
- They allow a potential visitor to see the necessary information in the search results, making the description as informative as possible.
- They record data about the page, help to display information correctly, and set up indexing (analyzing the site and entering it into the database for subsequent inclusion in the output).
Title tag
This tag defines the document’s title, but it is not displayed directly on the page, and you can see it in the name of a browser window or tab with an open site. The title plays a crucial role, as it is essential for ranking.
Recommended volume: 120 characters, 12-15 words
Thus, we conclude that the dot, question marks, and exclamations are stop symbols, and they should not be used in the title. As for other special characters, they don’t “beat” passages, but I wouldn’t use them anyway. There are always enough commas and dashes to make a good title. Colons and brackets are used much less often. By the way, you can use herringbone quotes. They also do not violate anything in our design.
Criteria for the Title tag
- It contains the maximum number of pure occurrences (promoted search queries).
- It starts with the most competitive or with a frequency search query. It is unnecessary to do this from the first word, but in the first 4-5 words, this request, the flagship for this page, should be present.
- Contains all the words from the promoted queries.
- It includes synonyms and highlights of comments from questions, as well as thematic words (which will tell the user what the pages are about or often found on the page or among competitors), if the length allows, in the region of 120 characters (although there is no strict requirement of 120 characters). If the Title tag is enormous, the significance of each word decreases, and Google very clearly tracks the decrease in the role of each subsequent word in the Title tag. In some cases, even the non-passage of the quorum if the terms are contained after the 12th. But, as a rule, twelve words are more than enough.
- For geo-dependent search queries, it explicitly indicates the city (toponym).
- It reads well and conveys the essence of the page.
When the Title is considered overoptimized or spam
It is inflated due to different words that do not relate to the URL. Too long (more than 12-18 words). These are not strict criteria, but it is necessary to pay attention to them. You do not need to add comments to the tag that do not relate to the page or are missing in search queries. First, we need to get into the output and only then convert the user into a click and increase the CTR. And you can not get into the production if you add extra words.
Deceives the user and does not match the page. This happens when the Title tag is clickbait and does not reflect the page’s content. Yandex will likely notice this, too, because it checks how much the text relevance of the Title tag matches the document’s content. Contains more than two repetitions of one word. Two repetitions are pretty enough (it can be the word “promotion” or “website,” etc.). Then you can use synonyms.
Phrases with a length of 4 or more words are repeated in the tag more than once, even considering the limitation. Putting a four-word term twice, separated by a comma, will have a negative impact.