Write a great title for your webpage

Lesley Hanes | June 2, 2015

Great titles help people find your webpages. To write a great title, make it descriptive yet concise, and easy to understand.

Make it descriptive yet concise

Use words that describe the content. Tell people what they’ll get from it.

If your title isn’t descriptive, it won’t make sense in a search result. If it isn’t relevant to a task or question, people might just skip it. As Google says:

Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query.

Source: Review your page titles and snippets

Four to ten words is usually plenty. If your title isn’t concise, it’ll get cut off in search results.

For example, this title is 11 words and the key word ‘guide’ is cut off. We have to scan the description to find out what the page is about.

This title is much better – it tells us all we need to know in just five words.

Make it easy to understand

If you use words most people understand, it’ll help your title show up in search results. So avoid jargon, abbreviations, noun strings (a bunch of nouns in a row), and words we don’t hear often.

If your title isn’t easy to understand, it might go way down in search results.

For example, when I searched ‘writing user manuals’, I found this entry about 13 pages in. I don’t understand the abbreviation and the noun string also makes it hard to understand.

Most people won’t go beyond the first three pages of search results, so make every word in your title work hard for its place.

Do you have a webpage that’s tricky to name? Tell us what it’s about and let’s see what we can do for you.