Google’s search engine is constantly working to provide better and better results to its readers. In short, it wants to give you quality results in your search. You can see their efforts in new Google updates that come in almost every month. This time Google changes

Now, Google has one more change in its search result but this change is only for the mobile search result. Now you can see the site name in the mobile search results so you can easily identify the websites that show the results. 

For a better understanding of this new Google, update let’s understand how we were seeing the website’s name before this update. 

Before we were using title tags to give our website a name. Let’s learn what is the title tag and its role in your website. 

What Is Title Tag?

A Title tag is an HTML code that gives a title to your web page. You can see the title tag of any website in the browser title bar and in the search engine result pages. The title tag is important for your website SEO and makes google identify your web page. 

Web page title in search result

So adding a title tag related to your web page can benefit both a user and a search engine. With the title tag, you make them understand what is your web page and its content about. 

Search engines search your title tag into the HTML code of your website

HTML title code

That is why creating a good title tag for your website is very important. A title tag is still important for your website SEO because Google only changes mobile search results. It’s still the same for other devices. 

What is the Site Name?

When you are searching for something Google list web pages in search results with the name of the website the page come from. This is called the site name. It is now seen in mobile google search results in many languages such as English, French, Japanese, and German.

Site name in mobile search result

The main purpose of the site name is to let users know the source of each result.

Google can use many different ways to automatically find your website’s site name. 

  • Website structure data 
  • Title tag content <title>
  • Headline element <h1>
  • og:site_name

Well, Google can not get the right site name if you are not making the effort for it. It will pick the random content automatically through the upper options but making it accurate is your responsibility. You can use the structure data on your home page to tell google the site name of your website. 

What is structure data?

Structure data is a standardized format that classifies the page content to searchers and Google. With this, you make your web page data into well define a structure, respect a data model, follow a purposeful order, and make your web page easy to understand by users and programmers. You can only store this data in the database. 

There are many kinds of structured data that you can use it. It is in the code format you can use for recipes, reviews, products, and more.

At Schema.org you can find all kinds of structured data makeup supported by the search engine. It has a large collection of codes for your web pages for different purposes. It has a code for the site name for the mobile search results. 

Here is JSON-LD structured data snippet that you need to add to your home page. You don’t need to add it to every page of your website just add it to your home page. 

<html>

  <head>

    <title>Example: A Site about Examples</title>

    <script type=”application/ld+json”>

    {

      “@context” : “https://schema.org”,

      “@type” : “WebSite”,

      “name” : “Example”,

      “url” : “https://example.com/”

    }

  </script>

  </head>

  <body>

  </body>

</html>

And if you want to give an alternative name for your website, you can do this by adding an alternativename property. 

<html>

  <head>

    <title>Example: A Site about Examples</title>

    <script type=”application/ld+json”>

    {

      “@context” : “https://schema.org”,

      “@type” : “WebSite”,

      “name” : “Example Company”,

      “alternateName” : “EC”,

      “url” : “https://example.com/”

    }

  </script>

  </head>

  <body>

  </body>

</html>

After adding this code to your web page you have to check if it is working or not. Use the Rich snippet test to find out if the process is successful. 

What else do you need to know about the site name?

Google search central also tells us to add a favicon if we don’t have it, they are going to show favicons on mobile search results. Use 48px to create your favicon for your website. 

Always be aware of the new updates of google and optimize your website according to it for better search result ranking. Adding a site name to your web page can help you to get recognized by the users who visit your website and it will increase brand awareness too.