Search Engine Advice:
The importance of page titles in search engine rankings
What give me the ability to give you search engine advice? I have learned from making mistakes. Let me tell you about one, so you don't make it too.
OK, we've all done it. You need to create the new page for your website. So you rename an existing page. Next you change the text. Then you change some pictures. You add a link to your menu line. Then you check the spelling. Proofread it. Make some more changes. Repeat the process three more times and your done!
Well, you thought you were.
Weeks later you are checking things out in Yahoo and you search for your new page using some of the relevant terms to see how well the page ranks. Since the subject matter was fairly rare, you expect to find yourself in one of the top three spots when you type in "Badin Festival lawn mower race". But your search doesn't even show your page in the first 30 listings.
After racking your brain as to the reason, you eventually discover that the page title is "Mayor falls asleep at town hall meeting". That was the title of the old page that you started your new page from. You just forgot to change it!
Loss of placement and the potential reader
Too many websites just create a generic page title and use it on all of the site's pages. This is a lost opportunity for generating beneficial placement in the search engines. Failing to put accurate and unique text in each of your page titles kicks you twice.
First, you have possibly lost the placement of your page in a valuable subject category in the search engines. A unique page title itself would have some influence in the placement. And text in the page title related to text in the content of the page would have been viewed as a positive item by the site crawlers. Two favorable factors for lucrative search engine placement lost!
Second, where you did get placement (thanks to headlines and text on the page) you communicated something different to the search engine users before they left Yahoo. The old page title about the mayor's nap is not what they were looking for. They wanted to know the results of the lawn mower race. So they just left Yahoo instead of clicking on the link to the page. Visit lost!
Setup for the page title mistake
Years of experience have taught me a few things. And one of those things is that I will make more mistakes. So I try to set things up for this particular mistake. I rename my home page and begin my new pages from it. Why? Because I am going to keep my home page title more generic than the titles of my back pages. So if I forget the new page title, the subject matter of the old page title doesn't appear to be completely unrelated to the content on the web page. And when I do make this mistake again, site visitors are less likely to leave.
So, give me a minute while I create new page titles for the "location", "headertags", and "createwebsitevalue" pages that I created a few day ago...
There! I'm ready to post today's advice.
Huck Huckabee
Small Business Websites & Find Searchers |
