Where the title appears
The title shows up in three places:
- The snippet in the search results — the blue clickable link. This is the main target of title optimisation.
- The browser tab — what a person sees with several tabs open.
- Social media shares — if no separate OG title is set, the page title is used.
<title>Nike Running Shoes — Buy Online | SportShop</title>
The structure of a good title
A working pattern for e-commerce:
[Main query] [Qualifier] — [Brand]
Examples:
| Page type | Bad | Good |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Trainers | Nike Trainers — Buy Online | SportShop |
| Product page | Product 12345 | Nike Air Max 270 Men’s — Price, Photos, Specs |
| Homepage | Home page | SportShop — Trainers and Running Apparel |
| Blog | An article about running | How to Choose Running Shoes: 5 Criteria |
Keyword placement matters
Search engines give more weight to keywords at the start of the title. “Buy Nike Trainers — SportShop” works better than “SportShop: we sell Nike trainers”.
Tip: do not start the title with the brand if the page is optimised for a specific query. Put the brand at the end, after a dash or a vertical bar.
Auto-generating titles for a large catalogue
In e-commerce with thousands of SKUs, writing a title by hand for every product is unrealistic. The standard answer is templates:
{Product name} {Attribute1} — buy for {Price} | {Store brand}
A templated title beats a missing one but loses to a hand-written title on priority pages. For top categories and flagship products, write them by hand.
Yandex versus Google
Yandex, the dominant search engine in Russia and several CIS markets, has historically weighted the title more heavily in ranking than Google. Google leans more on page content, the H1 and anchor text. For both engines the title remains a mandatory element of page optimisation.