Hungerford Web Design Blog

Page Titles

The title of your webpage(s) is absolutely critical in your goal for good Search Engine listings. The page title you choose is what you should expect to see in a search engine. Consider your page content and how the title best describes that content. Ensure you check the spelling of those titles and keep themshort to avoid truncation.

Avoid repeating titles 

Something we are considering at the moment is the fact that page titles should not be the same across a site. We use includes a lot on our main site and I am currently writing a way of dynamically generating the page title from the navigation structure.

Titles exisiting in content

Ensure that the words within your page titles exist as keywords within your content. Think of your page like a book. If the title was “war” and the book was about cookery then you would probably feel that the title of the book was misleading. The same principles apply here.

Site Mapping 

A map of your site (site map/sitemap) is crucial for both Search Engines and your users. It is basically a repository of your links which in one file can show everything you have to offer (again, for both engines and users).

We wrote a script to automatically create a visual sitemap for our users as well as an XML sitemap for google. You can do this manually though and it really isn’t a lot of work for most small to medium sized sites. For visual sitemaps simply consider your layout and check all of your links. For an XML sitemap, search “Google sitemaps” for the syntax.

We will post up our code in a day or two so you can steal it if you wish.

Everybody has to start somewhere. I remember trying to optimise my first site for search engines. It was a site I had written about 6 months before and I was pretty yound and very uninformed. I had written this site in one of the worst WYSIWYG site design programs ever (you can probably guess which) and even now I can remember just how difficult it was. Here are a few tips to start you on a journey considering Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization to those on the other side of the Atlantic).

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Standards Compliance

This is a wider issue than just SEO. Writing compliant code can make sure that your site is accessible to those with impairment(s), your site is visible in a large number of browsers (including text browsers) and shows a level of commitment to quality for starters.

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Perhaps you have bought a new domain name or need to change a filename without losing links which are pointing to it or maybe you have just changed the structure of your website. Regardless, your search engine rankings could take a real hit unless you make sure that people can still find your pages.

There are a couple of ways to achieve a redirect. Some are good and some are not so good, here we try to make some sense of it for you.

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It is something that has affected us here at Hungerford Web Design recently. One minute we are in the top 5 results for our keywords and the next we are on page 2 with one of our secondary domains and yet our primary domain is nowhere to be seen?!

The following should help put your mind at rest if you find that your site has suddenly disappeared. This text was taken directly from Your SEO Plan an excellent resource for anyone looking to improve their search rankings. Please do check out their site. We will be adding their link to our resources.

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