Search engine optimisation, or SEO, has become a complex but necessary task for any website that is anxious to be seen high up in the search engines’ rankings. This article explores the use of title elements in the search to help make websites more readily visible.
Title elements are part of the HTML code that is written to structure your web site. Search engines are quite responsive to these title elements. If you want to know what a title element looks like, then right click on any website and select the “View Source” sub menu. This then switches to a HTML version of the site – its source code – and the title element is visible as the word or words written between the two tags labelled “title” somewhere near the top.
Good HTML title elements should have at least three features. They should be based on your chosen key words or phrases; they should be completely relevant to that particular web page’s content; and are basically designed to act like a catchy headline and attract viewers to the site. Each page in your site should have a specific title in order to give it maximum search coverage.
Older websites in particular are, rather surprisingly, favoured by some of the major search engines including Google. By ‘older’ is meant any website that has been around for more than five years or so. Any older website that has poor title elements or has no titles at all has a lot of potential for search engine optimisation by spending a bit of time fiddling around with the titles to make them more search engine friendly. This should be qualified by saying that older websites with good, keyword rich and relevant content will be favoured even more by those very same search engines.
An example of a caravan website should help to illustrate the potential. A particular website that was already over ten years belonged to a company that specialised in both caravans for rental and caravans for sale. The website already had plenty of back links coming to it and the owner was pleased with both his sales side of the business and the references to caravan sales from the search engines. However he was concerned that there was very little reference to his caravan rentals and consequently it was this side of his business that was lagging.
An investigation into the reasons for this by a SEO specialist discovered that it was the use of his title elements that was letting down his rentals page. The title tags for the rentals section were far too unspecific and included phrases like “rentals” “available” and so on. When the optimiser changed the title tags and included the phrase “Flushing Meadows Caravan Rentals” (Flushing Meadows being the name of the company) not only did the search engine references become much more visible but his rentals business picked up too!
The moral of the story is that if you do have a good quality website for your business which has been around for some time and you are finding some strange inconsistencies in the way in which it has been reported by the search engines get your title elements checked out, if necessary by a professional optimiser: the problem might be a lot simpler than you thought!