Google Uses

  1. Content in title
  2. Main visual title shown on the page
  3. Heading elements - h1, especially the first
  4. Content in metaog:title
  5. Large, prominent text based on style esp. font-size
  6. Other text contained in the page
  7. Anchor text on the page
  8. Text within links that point to the page
  9. Website structured data
Metadata and Google search results.

Google title Recommendations

  1. Seclude extra website info in the home page's title
  2. Concise, quick, high-quality insight on the page
  3. Match content - "lyrics" only if page contains lyrics
  4. Match primary language & writing system
  5. No extras. Exception for site name, at start or end, separated with hyphen, colon, or pipe
The title is the primary piece of info to determine relevance against query. Consider updating it dynamically to reflect the actual content of the page.

Google Dislikes / Common Issues

  1. Every page being titled "Cheap products for sale" on commerce sites, or other aggressive and unhelpful in-title keyword stuffing
  2. Titles that do not help distinguish between two pages
  3. Boilerplate titles: variation on only a single part
  4. Uninformative: "BandName - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts"
  5. Flight-Pricing: changing, variable, such as prices
  6. Keyword-Stuffing, in the page, the meta, and titles. "Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars". Results that look spammy to users look spammy to Google
  7. Unnecessarily long or verbose (Will get truncated to fit the device width)
  8. Vague descriptors like "Home", "Profile", etc.

LD Json

Google reads from head, looking for a script with type=application/ld+json. See Site name appearance. 

    {
      "@context" : "https://schema.org",
      "@type" : "WebSite",
      "name" : "Example",
      "url" : "https://example.com/"
    }