What's in a title?
Sir Richard Branson, Dame Ellen MacArthur, Lord Norman Foster - all have titles which show recognition for what they have achieved in their chosen fields of business sport and architecture.
Titles are important on the web too. Search engines use these as a key way to determine what a web page is all about. So if it matters to the likes of Google and Bing it should matter to you when you are making changes to your website.
Fortunately, it isn't quite as daunting for those of you using our easy-to-manage content managed web sites as they will automatically generate the title tag based on the name of the new article that you have created. So our main top tip is to name your article appropriately.
Making effective use of title tags
Say that you have a page about your work as designers of extracare sheltered housing. Our clients Allan Joyce Architects named their page "Our Buildings | Extracare" Resulting in a top rank on Google Yahoo! Bing and (the very excellent) DuckDuckGo search engines against the term "extracare architects."
If you want to do this on your CMS driven web site then:
- Accurately describe the page contents - avoid using titles that have no relation to the content on the page
- Create unique titles for each page - this way search engines can use your title tags to determine how the page is distinct from others on your website.
- Titles should be brief and informative - don't make them overlong or stuffed with unnecessary keywords.
Try making similar changes to your pages and see if you can start to have an effect on how well your site starts to rank in search engines.
For advice on reworking your website please email