Title tags
The title tag is one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines because it tells Google what your page is about.
Think of the title tag more as a headline to the page you are creating or one of your existing page. The key purpose of a headline is to sell what’s on the page so make sure you tell people what they are going to get on the page and use keywords relating to the content on the page.
Getting the most out of your title tag
Make sure you focus on a primary and a secondary keyword for your page. You can do this by making sure you place the primary keyword at the beginning.
The title tag gives you a great opportunity to optimise for your primary keyword for the page as this is the information that will display in search engine results pages such as Google.
Example:
“Student experience | Get the most out of your...”
Optimises for the keywords “Student experience”
“Get the most out of your student experience”
Optimises for the keywords “Get the most...”
You should always make sure you have a unique title for every page on your site and the title should be relevant to the content of the page – you need to tell the user what they are going to see when they click through to the page.
Title tag – length
Title tags should be no more than 50-70 characters including spaces. This also has to allow for the words “University of Huddersfield” which is automatically added to every title tag when it displays in a search engine results page such as Google. This means you have around 45 characters to sell your page so think carefully about the title tag.
If you need to separate the words to split a primary and secondary keyword, we recommend you use the dash (-) symbol as this will be consistent with the way the University brand is added to the title tag.
Example:
Accommodation – Storthes Hall – University of Huddersfield (58 characters)
Placements – Business School – University of Huddersfield (56 characters)
Study support – Undergraduate – University of Huddersfield (58 characters)