Posted on: - by Robyn Smith
What are Page Titles and H1 Tags?
Page Titles are HTML tags that can be assigned to a sentence of text that defines the content on the page; the page title. Search engines look at them as a short description or introduction to a page in order to determine its content/theme.
H(x) tags can also be seen as a kind of page title as they are used to add a header to specific bits of content within a given page.
How are Page Titles and H1 Tags used?
Page Titles appear in search engines, in a browsers title bar, in a pages source code, and also shows in snippets when the link to a page is pasted into elements like comment boxes.
The use of the numbers in H tags, H1, H2, H3 etc. represent the hierarchy or importance of information on that page. So the H1 tag would represent the most important section of the page, H2 the second most, H3 the third etc.
What do Page Titles and H1 Tags look like?
Page Titles aren’t visibly present on a page; they simply rest in the pages source code so they can be accessed by search engines.
Page Title code looks like this:
<head>
<title>Online Advertising Blog – Serchen Interactive</title>
</head>
Page Titles will appear in search engines like this:
On this page, the ‘Our Blog’ text at the top is a H1 tag, the title of the post is a H2 tag and the title of this paragraph “What do Page Titles and H1 Tags look like?” is an example of a H3 tag. They can differ in formatting but are usually bolded and are often underlined.
The H3 looks like this (excluding colour formatting):
<h3> What do Page Titles and H1 Tags look like? </h3>
How do Search Engines look at Page Titles and H1 Tags?
Page Titles are an important factor that every search engine takes in account when determining the ranking of a page in SERPs.
Search engines will look at Page Titles for keywords to determine the relevance of the page to the given search query, so it’s vital to make sure your Page Titles are accurate and relevant to the page.
H1, H2, & H3 tags are also seen by search engines and its thought that they show a slight preference to keywords displayed within these tags, which again means you need to make sure these are relevant.
How long should Page Titles and H1 Tags be?
With most search engines, 70 characters including spaces seems to be the maximum limit for Page Titles, Any longer will results in the title getting cut off in SERPs which can ruin the image of your appearance.
As H(x) tags are just text within a page there is no limit on how long they should be. Although, as they’re still titles its best to keep them shorter (roughly the same as Page Titles) as it just looks better and keeps your page neater. Of course, this is completely up to you.
See also: Quick Guides: The Meta Description Tag
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