Web Design, SEO & CSS… etc

<title>www.mywebsite.com</title>

Urghh! How many times have I seen the title tags simply filled in with the website domain name? I suppose it is better than nothing which is also often the case but…

The title is what will show in a search engine result as the large blue link. It is also the text you see in the top left corner of your web browser. If you see Untitled Document there when vieiwing your website it means you haven’t added a title tag – so get one in there, pronto :O)

You don’t have to worry about the words Untitled Document showing up in search results because they won’t… Unless search engines have become very lax these days a site so badly optimized isn’t going to rank very well at all, this is not a good thing.

Your title should include keywords relevant to the pages subject rather than the site name. These will show bold in search results if they’re the keywords the visitor typed in. Let’s say you run a website that advertises rental property in France, it’s called beaupeeps.com and your home page title is:

<title>Beau Peeps</title> or <title>www.beaupeeps.com</title>

Using your business name Beau Peeps as your title tag is pretty meaningless, it doesn’t contain one keyword relevant to the site subject. Someone searching for Beau Peep isn’t likely to be looking for a website about rental property in France, nursery rhymes maybe…

Similarly using  “Homepage” alone in your title is meaningless with regard to your business/website subject so a suggestion would be:

<title>Rental Properties In France</title>

Hey look at that! It actually tells you or more importantly your site visitor and any passing search engine spider what your website is about. See below for a typical Google search result.

Number 1 out of 6,200,000 results for that phrase… That’s what SEO is all about!

There is a limit to the number of characters (around 60) that you can use before the end of the title disappears off the edge of the search results blue link. like so:

This is a very long title tag that will eventually vanish off the edge of th…

Each page of your website should have its own title, try not to duplicate the same title for each page but remember to include keyword/s relevant to that page eg <title>Rental Properties In Brittany, France</title> on a page about property for rent in Brittany etc.

The same rules apply in your use of the meta description tag…