The goal of search engines, when choosing which pages to display in search results, is to locate the information most relevant to the users search. Page titles are used by search engines as a starting point to determine what your page is about - how will it help the user answer the question, or find the service or product, they are looking for?
When we talk about page titles, in terms of SEO, we do not mean the actual written title on the page, but the title displayed by the browser in the upper left hand corner of the screen. This page title is located in HEAD the section of your webpage, and is indicated by the TITLE tag. When using the website builder, to access the page title, simply access the page list, click on "properties" next to each page, and add your chosen title into the "Page Title" section.
How to Create an SEO Friendly Page Title
Page Title Length
At SiteFresh Web Design, we aim to create page titles not more than 67 characters in length (this includes spaces). This is because titles longer than this can be truncated by search engines (when you see the .... at the end of a longer title) and so do not provide your viewer with any information, and also because the longer the title, the less weight is attributed to each individual word in the title.
Stop Words
As the importance of each individual word is relevant to search engines, we also choose not to use "stop" words - these are words such as "and", "the", "or" and so forth. These words, while perhaps grammatically correct in a sentence format, are not required in a page title, and simply take up space which could be used for adding information relevant to your page.
Your Business Name
Adding your business name to each page on your website is not essential - nor is it necessarily a great idea, unless you have a brand which consumers will actually enter into the search engine - like Nike or Apple, for example. It is enough to add your business name in, perhaps, the page title of the Contact Us or About Us pages of your website. Search engines will find your business name from the copyright notice at the bottom of your site, and also, of course, from your domain name, if you have used your full business name. So, a page from your site will display for searches which include your business name without needing to add it into every page title.
Relevancy to Content
So, taking these ideas into consideration, then decide what it is your page content is really about - what main keyword phrases are you expressing in your content? Use these phrases as your page title, and seperate any points with - or | for neatness and ease of reading. In example, this blog, on our site, includes information on website design, SEO marketing and on how to best utilise the Website Builder's WYSIWYG editor. So, we created the page title
Website Design Tips | SEO Marketing Tools | WYSIWYG Editing
You'll see this title is 59 characters long - yes, there's room to add more characters, but we had already indicated what the page was about, so chose not to add more. This title contains no stop words, just naturally formed, easy to read phrases which describe what the page is about. This title also does not include the business name.
Page titles using information in this way provide both search engines, and consumers, with a clear idea on the content of yor web page. A good page title can then be enhanced by adding an engaging and interesting page description, further encouraging consumers to click on your web page. Our next SEO blog will cover creating effective meta-descriptions!
