LLM Best Practices

Title tags

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Overview

The title tag is the highest-impact piece of metadata on a page. It controls the SERP click-through rate, sets the user’s expectation before the page loads, and is the strongest on-page relevance signal Google reads. Title tags are not meta descriptions; the description is the snippet body, the title is the link itself. This page covers the title tag only; for the description, see write-meta-descriptions.

Target 50 to 60 characters

Google truncates titles at roughly 580 pixels on desktop, which lands between 50 and 60 characters for most fonts. Past that, the title is cut with an ellipsis and the keyword at the end is lost.

<!-- Good: 54 characters -->
<title>Postgres backup strategies for production (2026)</title>
 
<!-- Bad: 78 characters, truncated -->
<title>The complete guide to Postgres backup strategies for production databases in 2026</title>

Count characters, not words. A short title with the primary keyword and the brand beats a long title that gets cut.

Put the primary keyword in the first 30 characters

Google weights the early portion of the title more heavily and so does the user scanning the SERP. The keyword goes first; modifiers and the brand follow.

  • “Postgres backup strategies | Example” beats “Example Blog: how to back up your Postgres database.”
  • The primary keyword should match the H1 (see content on intent matching).
  • Avoid leading the title with the brand unless the brand is the query.

End with the brand and a separator

The brand at the end is a trust signal that does not cost ranking weight. Use a consistent separator across the site.

  • Pipe (|) is the cleanest and most common.
  • Dash (-) works but can be confused with a hyphen inside a keyword.
  • Em-dash is banned across this vault; never use it as a title separator.

Pick one separator and use it sitewide. Inconsistent separators look like a CMS bug.

Know the four triggers that make Google rewrite your title

Google rewrites titles on roughly 60% of SERP impressions. The rewrite is almost always worse than the original. Avoid the four triggers that cause it.

  • Vague or generic titles: “Home,” “Welcome,” “Untitled.” Google substitutes the H1 or the URL.
  • Keyword stuffing: “Postgres backup, Postgres restore, Postgres dump, Postgres database backup.” Google rewrites to a single keyword and the brand.
  • Mismatched intent: the title promises a tutorial; the body is a product page. Google rewrites from the body.
  • Boilerplate prefixes: every title starts with “Blog | Example | …“. Google strips the prefix and rewrites the rest.

The fix in every case is to write one specific title per page that matches the body.

Add click-magnetism without crossing into clickbait

A title that ranks but does not earn clicks ranks lower over time; CTR feeds back into ranking. Five levers improve CTR without triggering a rewrite.

  • A number: “7 Postgres backup strategies.”
  • The current year: “Postgres backup strategies (2026).” Update the year on the annual refresh.
  • Brackets or parentheses: “(updated),” “(with examples),” “(2026 guide).”
  • A specific qualifier: “for production,” “on AWS,” “without downtime.”
  • A power verb: “ship,” “fix,” “audit,” “compare.”

Stack at most two of these per title. Three or more reads as clickbait and Google rewrites.

Test title variants with Search Console CTR data

The title is the only metadata you can A/B test through observation. The loop runs on a four-week cadence.

  1. Pull GSC Performance by Page for the last 28 days.
  2. Sort by impressions descending; filter to URLs with CTR below the position-adjusted average.
  3. Rewrite the title with one lever changed (number, year, bracket, qualifier).
  4. Deploy, wait 14 to 28 days, compare CTR for the same query set.

Change one lever per iteration so the signal is clean. Title rewrites take effect within hours of the next crawl; CTR data stabilizes in two weeks.

Common errors

  • Duplicate titles across the site. Every indexable URL gets a unique title.
  • Title that does not match the H1. Google reads both; mismatch is an intent signal failure.
  • Putting the meta description copy in the title. The title is the link; the description is the snippet. See write-meta-descriptions.
  • Forgetting the title on og:title and twitter:title. Social titles default to the page title only when those tags are absent; ship them explicitly.
  • Using the same title formula as the H1 verbatim with no SERP-specific tuning. The H1 is for the reader on the page; the title is for the reader on the SERP. They overlap heavily but the title can be tighter. See headlines for the headline craft side.

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