SEO Basics - Changing Page Titles and Page Descriptions

In the previous article we looked at what effect Page Titles and Page Descriptions had on the entry in the search engine index and showed that they were an important building block of SEO and directly effected the information that was held about the websites page in the search engine index. (See Previous Article: SEO Basics - Page Titles and Page Descriptions)

What should I change my page titles and page descriptions too.

Page Titles

Lets take a look at page titles first. If you look at the top of your browser you will notice that the page title in the very top blue bar for this article in the SEONERD blog is as follows.

"SEO Nerd - Search Engine Optimisation For Beginners - SEO Basics - Changing Page Titles and Page Descriptions"

You can see the page title follows this format

Website Name - Description Of The Site Or Subsection (optional) - Title of the individual page

Website Name.
Example: SEO Nerd
This is usually the same as the domain or web address but not always.

Description Of The Site Or Subsection (optional).
Example: Search Engine Optimisation For Beginners

For simple sites with very few pages and only one level down form the home page will probably not need to include this in there page title.

Guest House Home page

• - Tariffs
• - Accommodation
• - About US

More complex sites that have subsections such as

Guest House Home page

• - Tariffs
• o Summer Tariffs
• o Winter Tariffs

Title of the individual page.
Example: SEO Basics - Changing Page Titles and Page Descriptions
This is the title of the article or page and should contain the key information about the subject of the pages content.

This ensures that all the most important and relevant information about this particular page is included in the page title and therefore indexed by the search engines.

If your website has the same page title for every page it makes it very difficult for search engines to index it correctly.

The portion of code of each page that actually defines this information is the title tags which will appear as follows in most simple html websites at the top of every page between the head tags


Page Description

The page description should describe the content of the page not just be a copy of the first paragraph as the page description should be around 151 characters long including spaces or on Avg. about 20 – 30 words and your first paragraph maybe much longer than this.

The page description will be picked up and used by most if not all search engines as shown in the previous article

For example if this was for an accommodation website say a guest house I would use the following as a home page description

(establishment name) (style of accommodation) provides accommodation in (town), Accommodation in (county) is renowned for its warmth and (establishment name) is situated in easy reach (local attraction or service).

This would work out in the real world as

Abbey House Hotel provides accommodation in Reading, Accommodation in Berkshire is renowned for its warmth and Abbey House is situated in easy reach of Madjeski Stadium Reading.

This ensures that all the most important and relevant information about this particular page is included in the page description and therefore indexed by the search engines.

If your website has the same page description for every page it makes it very difficult for search engines to index it correctly.

The portion of code of each page that actually defines this information is the meta tag “description" which will appear as follows in most simple html websites at the top of every page between the head tags



NB: At this point I should suggest that if you are not confident in changing the code of your website that you involve the company that put your website together, another web design company or an SEO Consultant

SEO Basics – Page Titles and Page Descriptions

Now you understand the basics of what a search engine is and how they index sites to their database/directory, you can start to change your site so that it will be indexed correctly by the search engines. (See Previous Article: Introduction - What is SEO) We will take a look at the quickest and easiest things to change, which are page titles and page descriptions.

How changing your page titles and page description will affect your indexed results in search engines.

If you look at search results in most search engines, and well take www.google.com as our example, each returned result hast two main pieces of information.

One highlighted sentence or title in blue at the top and a brief description in black text below. The example here was from searching for “restaurants in London”. You will notice that the instances of the words that I searched for are in bold. These we call the keywords or phrases.




The title shown in the example above is taken from the code of your page or pages when it is indexed by the search engine and similarly so is the description that you see in the index it is also taken from the code of your page. Below is part of the code for the page which produced the above index entry in google.com, notice the high lighted lines which corispond to the info the search engine has indexed.





NB: At this point I should suggest that if you are not confident in changing the code of your website that you involve the company that put your website together or indeed a web design company.

Introduction - What is SEO

Lets start at the very beginning. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process of setting up a website in such away that it will be indexed by search engines correctly.


What are Search engines
Search Engines are essentially just really big databases that index websites like a directory and allow you to search there databases online using keywords or phrases. Many people are still under the impression that when you search for something through a search engine your searching the Internet, when in-fact you actually searching an online database.

The Search Engines create there database by using algorithms and software that actively adds entries into the database based on the algorithms criteria. Depending on how well your website fits the criteria of the algorithms, effects how relevant they think your site is and therefore how high you will appear in the search engines database.

So Why Do I Need To SEO My Website
SEO Basics are about making sure your website fits the criteria the best it can, therefore ensuring it gets indexed for the correct terms and information i.e. you wouldn't put an entry into the yellow pages index under kitchen repairs if you were a motor mechanic.

If you ever get approached by a company gauranteing your website a top ten or first spot in Google there lying so politely put the phone down. No one can guarantee a position in Google or any other search engine, however if done properly SEO will give you the best chance of ranking highly.

Next: SEO Basics – Page Titles and Page Descriptions

Wikipedia def. of Search Engine