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.