Website Blueprint

Newbie SEO Lesson | Page Titles & Descriptions

Posted in Aug 2009 | SEO

There are dozens of techniques that are used to get your website to appear higher in the search engine results of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. The process of SEO (search engine optimization) can be overwhelming. But, there are two elements we can take advantage of that will certainly help.

Page Titles and Page Descriptions

Look at the image below. The results that appear in the search engines reflect your page title and page description. Having the right content in these two areas are bound to help your SEO efforts.

The page title is the headline link that appears in the Google search results. The page description is what describes what the particular page is about. You are allowed up to 70 characters (spaces included) for your page title and up to 160 characters (spaces included) for your page description. Utilize every bit of this space to describe what your page is about. And remember to maximize keywords that may be used by potential customers as they’re searching for you.

Depending on the platform you’re using to publish your website (Dreamweaver, WordPress, etc…) will depend where you’ll enter this information. Regardless, it will always be in the HTML code of your web pages (this is what Google and the search engines see). You can see the source code of any web page by selecting View>Source in your Internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc…). You can see how the results from the image above appear to Google in the HTML source code below.

If there is one thing to do that will improve how high you appear in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search results, adding keyword rich page titles and descriptions is it.

If you need someone to make sure your web pages are SEO friendly, contact us.

Tags: google seo, page description, page title, SEO