Rankavia

Category: SEO

Search engine optimisation that holds up: titles, structure, schema and the checks behind them.

  • The structured data that is still worth adding

    The structured data that is still worth adding

    Structured data is worth adding when it changes how a page is shown or understood, and not otherwise. Here is the short list that still pays in 2026 and the longer list that quietly stopped.

    Still worth it

    • Organization and WebSite on the home page: who you are, your logo, your official profiles. This feeds knowledge panels and helps answer engines resolve your brand as an entity.
    • Article with author, datePublished and dateModified: the baseline every content page should carry.
    • Product with Offer, price, availability and ratings: still produces rich results and feeds shopping surfaces.
    • BreadcrumbList: cheap, and it replaces the URL in result snippets with a readable path.
    • LocalBusiness with opening hours and address: essential for anything with a physical location.

    Mostly decorative now

    • FAQPage: rich results were withdrawn for all but government and health sites. The visible Q&A still helps readers and answer engines; the markup does little.
    • HowTo: removed from results entirely.
    • Speakable: supported by almost nothing that users touch.

    How Rankavia handles it

    One connected graph per page rather than scattered blocks: Organization, WebSite, WebPage, Article and BreadcrumbList with stable identifiers linking them. You pick the page type when it differs from the default, paste custom JSON-LD when you need something unusual, and the validator tells you before publishing whether it parses. The types that stopped paying are still available, labelled as informational, so nobody mistakes them for a ranking lever.

  • Title tags and meta descriptions: the rules that still matter

    Title tags and meta descriptions: the rules that still matter

    Title tags are the oldest lever in SEO and still one of the few that changes click-through rates directly. The rules are short, and most sites break at least one of them.

    How long should a title be?

    Between 30 and 60 characters. Google renders titles by pixel width, not characters, so 60 is a guide rather than a wall, but past it the end gets cut on mobile. Below 30 you are usually leaving the topic unsaid. Put the specific words first and the brand last; a reader scanning results reads the beginning of the line and little else.

    Should the brand be in every title?

    Yes, at the end, separated by a consistent character. Rankavia uses templates for this so you never type the site name by hand: %title% %sep% %sitename% is the default for posts, and the separator is one setting for the whole site. When a page has an empty title the template collapses cleanly to the site name instead of leaving a dangling dash.

    Does the meta description affect rankings?

    Not directly, and Google rewrites it about half the time. It still matters because the other half is the text that persuades someone to click, and because answer engines read it as a summary of the page. Write it as a one-sentence answer of 70 to 160 characters. If you cannot summarise the page in a sentence, that is a sign about the page, not the description.

    What about duplicate titles?

    Duplicates happen on archives, paginated lists and tag pages more than on articles. Templates solve most of it: a page number variable on paginated titles, the term name on archives, the author name on author pages. The remaining duplicates show up in the site audit as a single list you can work through.

    Updated on 8 October 2026.