SEO help: Improve your page titles for better search rankings
In an effort to spread the knowledge - I'm going to write some brief posts about how you can improve your website, mainly by optimising it for search engines and search result pages. The hope is that they will be informative, sometimes interesting and arm you with a checklist to go away and make changes yourself. The first set of crib notes relate solely to Page titles.
What are Page titles?
Each of your website pages has its own distinct page title. They appear in between the html tags <title>This is my page title</title> within the code itself. If you do a right-click on a web page and select "view page source" (in firefox) you will be able to see the page title within the code - it will be near the top. Go on give it a go - don't be scared. If you do a view source on this page, for example, you will see the title of this page is "SEO tips: Improve your page titles for better rankings | coldpie's blog: web ramblings and thoughts."
But where do they appear on the page themselves?
Page titles don't show on the web page real estate but instead appear in the top bar of the browser frame - just above where you type what web address you want to view.
So again for this page you will see the page titles here:
Why do page titles matter?
Page titles matter for two main reasons. The first is that search engines treat the words that make up your page titles as one of the most important factors when ranking a website or web page.
When Google (or MSN or Yahoo) ranks your page it does so using a complex set of algorithms taking into account many tens/hundreds/thousands of factors. It's a complicated and billion dollar business and too complex for this post (read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank for more), however, what's important is that words which appear on your webpage all contribute to how well your page ranks for a particular search phrase. And within that the words which appear within your page title have higher priority than other content on your webpage.
This title tag has consistently been the most important on-page SEO factor for the past few years.Andy Hagans in http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
The second main reason that page titles are important is because they are the thing people will see on the search engine results page itself. Take a look at the following search result on Google:
The top link is for this blog post and it's the page title which is used as the link text. All search engines use the page title of the webpage as the link text within the search result page in this way. Because it is this text that most people will read first when scanning a search result page it needs to make sense and appeal so the user will go ahead and click through to your site.
It's for these reasons that having a well written page title with a peppering of related keywords to the page itself is important. Keeping a user on your webpage or site after they've clicked through is for another time - but of equal importance.
Some simple rules
So now you know what page titles are, why they are important and where they are used - how should you write your page titles?. Below are some simple rules which should guide you:
- Make sure page titles are different for each page
- Make sure page titles make sense to a human and directly reflect what is on the page itself
- Limit the length to between 60 - 70 characters as anything longer won't be shown on the search results page (see SEO Moz's cheat sheet for more)
- Put the most important keywords first if possible. On GCC's website for example we made sure that the course title was first and upfront on their course listing pages
- Put your brand name at the end of your page title (sometimes its best first but generally focus attention on the elements which differentiate your pages)
- Try to avoid vague and general terms (such as "free", "cheap", "best") and use specific locations if relevant (for example "Damp proofing specialists in Surrey")
There are other things to consider too - including a decent amount of keyword research - this is something we'll take a look at a later date.
How should I go about improving my page titles?
First of all you will probably want to check to see what your website's page titles currently are. Google handily gives you a quick and easy way to do that - just type in "site:www.yourwebsite.com" into the search box. So to see coldpie's page title's you'd type "site:www.coldpie.co.uk". The results page will list all of the pages that Google knows about for your website and each of the links will be the page titles you currently have. Have a look through the results and see if the titles fairly reflect each of the pages on your website.
If when you run this test and all your web pages have exactly the same title for each page such as the example below then it's definitely time to make a change!
If you don't think your page titles are descriptive enough - then change them. Concentrate on each page individually and come up with a couple of keywords which you think people will use to find your page and are used on the page itself. Ignore the design for now and concentrate solely on the words. Perhaps take a look at the Readability Bookmarklet (and here) which allows you to view your webpage as text only and therefore to some extent how search engines see your pages.
What if I can't change the page titles myself
If you are unable to get down and dirty with the code itself then we'd suggest creating a document (whether in Word, Excel or something similar) and list out all your webpage URLS, the current page title and then create a new page title if needed. When you've finished send that document through to your developer or development team. It should be no issue for them to replace them for you.
Some further reading
Hopefully this post has been useful - although feel free to let us know anything you think we've got wrong. Knowledge is power so take a look at the following links for more detailed info on page titles:
- SEO Book's article & video on page titles
- What the experts say about the importance of page titles
- Another blog post about page titles at SEO Moz
Tags: page-titles, seo
October 8th, 2009 at 9:28 am
thanks for share, its very useful for me as a newbie.