The title tag, known by some, a bit incorrect, as the title „meta” tag, is considered one of, if not the most, important on-page element.
Some tips on it:
- Generally, it’s OK to use the brand name of the company at the end of it: „title – Brand name”.
- I generally advise in using „: ” separator before the brand name. Alternatively, you could use „ | ” or „ – ”.
- For the homepage, I would put the brand name at the beginning of the title.
- I would advise in writing the brand name not as „Site.com”, but, rather „Site”.
- For the length of the title, it’s best to do your own testing, but, generally, a length of 65 characters is completely safe, <= 70 is „good enough”, 70-80 is risky at least, and what’s above 80 characters with spaces will generally be cut of for sure.
- I would advise in putting lots of emphasis on writing the homepage title tag, as it tends to be more important than others.
- If you have an option, avoid special characters in titles, as they might not look good on Google’s homepage. Test and see for yourself.
- It’s not OK to have pages with duplicate titles, they are considered a form of duplicate content. You don’t need 100% different titles, but >90% is a good KPI to aim for.
- You can crawl easily your web site and see what is the title of the pages using tools such as Screaming Frog or XENU.
- You should focus on establishing a consistency between titles (the so-called „meta” titles) and page titles (generally, created using H1 tags). They can be a bit different, for example the H1 tag doesn’t need the brand name, but, more or less, they should be as similar as possible.