Better Page Titles
How to Optimise Your Page Titles
Making your web pages as appealing to the search engines as possible ('Search Engine Optimisation', or 'SEO') is an ongoing process. Your SiteSuite website tools allow you to update and refine your site, which is critical for SEO.
One way that you can improve the structure of your website for optimisation is to use your SiteSuite web page editor to make your Page Titles and Menu Labels more precise.
- There needs to be consistency between the information in your Page Titles and in the content area of your web pages. Find out more about writing search engine-friendly content.
- Search engines such as Google index and rank web pages, not websites, so it's important for each page to be clearly identified and for each one to include useful, relevant information.
The examples below are based on a fictitious photography studio, 'Happy Snaps Melbourne'. Their services fall into three main categories: weddings, 'glamour' portraits and children's portraits. They have divided the information on their site into these three categories and given each page an appropriate Title and Menu Label.
Page Titles versus Menu Labels
Choosing Web Page Titles and Menu Labels
- Use Page Titles and Menu Labels that accurately describe the content of each page and what your business does.
- Use accurate descriptive phrases or brief sentences for your Page Titles, but do not use lists of keywords.
Happy Snaps' six-page website has a horizontal navigation menu that lists the six pages. To help customers navigate around the site quickly and spot what they want at a glance, they chose short, generic titles for the Menu Labels, such as ‘Home’, ‘Weddings’ and ‘Contact Us’.
For their Page Titles, however, Happy Snaps expanded on the Menu Labels, choosing short phrases that accurately describe the contents of each page. Menu Labels should be short, and a generic title such as 'Home' works well within the context of the navigation menu. Page Titles, however, should help visitors and search engine 'bots' (the automated program that ‘reads’ the content of your website) identify the unique content of the individual pages. The Page Title can include a few search keywords, but should not be a lengthy list.
See the difference between the Menu Label, 'Weddings', and the Page Title:
Menu Label: Weddings
Page Title: Wedding Photographers Melbourne: Happy Snaps
Tips
- Do not make your Page Titles long lists of keywords or superlatives (e.g. greatest, cheapest, lowest, best). Doing this will not boost your site's search engine results.
- Describe the purpose of the page, rather than indulging in a keyword blitz (the search engines refer to this as 'keyword stuffing'and 'spamming'). The search engines penalise sites for using excessive or deceptive methods to lure visitors to websites.
- Your Page Titles can be up to 60 characters long, including spaces, separators and punctuation.
This is not a suitable Page Title, as it could be penalised for ‘keyword stuffing’, and a web browser cannot display this many characters, anyway:
- photographer, photographers, photography studio, photographic studio, wedding photographers, wedding photography, wedding photos, glamour portraits, glamour photography, glamour photos, baby photography, baby portraits, baby photos, photographers Melbourne, wedding photographers Melbourne
Related articles on site promotion and optimisation
How to create search engine-friendly content
Why you need inbound links and how to get them