A practical checklist for title tags

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Run through this the next time title tags comes up.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The checklist

• The title is the biggest on-page signal you fully control
• Front-load the terms that matter most
• Duplicate titles across pages waste the opportunity
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What is actually at stake

The title is the biggest on-page signal you fully control. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about title tags before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Duplicate titles across pages waste the opportunity — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.