Are titles as optional as descriptions yet?

[JS_Harris]

"What? Not having a proper description? Thoughts of not having a page title? Bad webmaster"
This question is not for people who will want to instinctively give that type of response after only reading the title of this post, please read on.

Yes, page titles and meta descriptions are useful but...

If you don't include a description meta tag Google will source the best snippet from the page to use as description based on topic searched. If the page ranks for other keywords and you look those up you'll sometimes find a different snippet better suited to that query from the same page. While not all search engines do this Google does. You can wait a month to see what Google uses and copy/paste that into the description yourself later on if that worries you.

My question is about titles. If you don't provide one Google chooses one for you, sorta. I haven't tested if it's very good at getting decent CTR from search doing this but I imagine if Google changes the title based on Query using content from the page you could potentially get the click for a wider range of subjects per page. Untested.

Thoughts?

[goodroi]

Titles are optional & so is SEO. If you want better SEO results, use the title tag. Be careful not to conflate Google modifying what they display on SERPs with quality signals for Googlebot & its AI system.

KISS - Keep it super simple especially for Google to recognize & understand your content.

[phranque]

although google may choose a title when showing your url in the SERP, the title you choose may better determine the relevance of your page for those results.
the title google chooses may be due to the query rather than the content.
in other words, without a title you may not get into the SERP for google to change it.

[iamlost]

While G does retitle SERP pages it:
* doesn’t always (the reasons why, why not are well worth considering/understanding)
* still recommends sites well title their pages

Create good titles and snippets in Search Results [developers.google.com]

The goal of the snippet [description] and title is to best represent and describe each result and explain how it relates to the user's query.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the title

...

You can help improve the quality of the title and snippet displayed for your pages by following the general guidelines below.

...

* make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> tag.
* Page titles should be descriptive and concise.
* Avoid keyword stuffing
* Avoid repeated or boilerplate titles.
* Brand your titles, but concisely.

However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There's a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a website owner is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query.

When we know the user's query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant.

Note: there are nuances to titles and descriptions that many/most webdevs overlook; testing hypotheses remains critical, but competitive advantage does exist in this area.

By all means give over the titling of content to third parties, what could possibly go wrong?

[engine]

It's good practice to create and use regimented formats as it gives some levels of control, not least for the page developer.

I still use meta keywords, which i know are useless for google, but they help me focus on content for entities and patterns.

[lucy24]

Titles are seen by humans. Meta descriptions aren't.

[lammert]

Meta descriptions are seen by humans in the SERPs. They are the single most powerful content of a website to convert a searcher into a visitor. I think you meant "meta keywords" instead?

[lucy24]

I meant humans who are actually on the page. They may or may not have seen the meta description, depending on how they found the page. Even within the narrow context of G### search, a searcher is not necessarily shown the meta description. But humans will definitely see the title, since it's right there on your screen. That's one reason why--for those who care--the <title> element is the one thing the w3 validator insists on in the <head>. Most humans will be something other than impressed if all their tabs simply say “Untitled” or whatever browsers currently put if there is no <title>. (It also, of course, makes it a bit harder to identify which tab you want to bring up.)

All this is, of course, assuming that the site cares what happens after a person has clicked in the SERP. If all that matters is arrival on the page, then nothing else makes any difference.