Do your page titles properly reflect the content of the page?
Just to quickly make sense of what I am going to say, open an article in your site and see what it says in the top of the browser bar. If it doesn’t show the article title within the first 10 to 60 characters, you have got a duff title. (10 to 60 characters in a title equates to what is seen in Google search results.)
Titles that don’t add up
If you search Google for references to Zwinky, the results will include articles from The Pisstakers on page 5! Wow wee, not bad for a satire site, but the trouble is, the page title listed in Google isn’t “Zwinky drag and drop into the trash”, but The Pisstakers daily web search for computer hardware, software .. So what? Job done! The article may get seen by a few of the millions into Zwinky.
Well, yes and no. It would be easy to say that being ranked on page 5 for a popular search term is good enough, and maybe that is all it is worth, but if the title isn’t obvious, you run the risk that even the few readers persistent enough to look at page 5 will miss your fab article. Essentially, if your title in the search results doesn’t equate even remotely to what the searcher was searching for, the article is worth almost nothing to anyone - what a waste of an insightful Zwinky article that could change the world of MySpace.
Titles and SEO
And following on from there, ethical SEO helped me demystify the SEO title issue a little further, as well as outline a general SEO strategy. Search engines like logical flow. If your site is called The Alphabet, Google would like to see an article entitled “ABC”, with H1, H2 etc paragraph headings that include ABC, followed by a handful of keywords related to ABC included in the main content, plus anchor text linking in- and off-site to relevant articles that add to the story of ABC. Hopefully you can see that the whole SEO flow is sort of messed up if the page title, ie the highest level of this logical chain, is wrong!
SEO plug-ins
I cannot help thinking that with my current page titling approach (dictated to by the blogging software) I am working with one hand behind my back. Wordpress had this issue too, maybe someone can clarify if it still does, and I know the person who inspired this post, It’s Phishie, was horrified to see all his articles with the same title. He found an SEO plug-in for Joomla blogs to rectify the issue, maybe you need to double check your blog software and maximise your titles too?
5 Responses to “Do your page titles properly reflect the content of the page?”
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May 17th, 2007 at 8:24 am
WP no longer does this, although I’ve noticed BAYB does. How did you manage that guys?
I’ve altered my titles to show the post title first, blog second as well, less for the SE robots, more for the human eyes that read the results.
Good heads-up, people should fix this if they’re interested in SE traffic.
May 17th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I make sure I have keyword rich titles the best I can. I came up on the top page for “British Gas Boilers” for a while and made about $50 in adsense, was so happy!
But like Chris said, BAYB does, my blog doesn’t.
May 17th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
I don’t know if it does anymore does it? Maybe the older posts but I get just Blog About Your Blog showing up. Over on Crypt Hunter and QYDJ they both show the blog title then the post title. I’m going to have to look into it here.
May 24th, 2007 at 3:55 am
ahhh - Ed you have a serious side … I think it could be time for the plooptionary to see what you can do for us then! IF it gets half way to the excellence of the pisstakers I’d be delighted
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:07 am
Hi, I wanted to Digg this, and when I pressed Digg This Story, I got the below error:
Oops, what you’re looking for isn’t here!
The page you requested is not here but there are a few things you can try:
* Try searching for the story you’re looking for using the form above.
* Go to the homepage to see the most recent stories.
* Browse the topics above to find the story.
Pretty sure it’s a website bug? Please let us know and we’ll try to get it fixed.
Let me know when it’s fixed so that I get back and digg it. Thanks