Now, this is something that a lot of people will already know about, but going by my recent experience with a new client of mine, not everybody does, and it’s such an important elements of Search Engine Optimisation that I feel obliged to put out my two cents worth on the subject.
The work involved improving the indexability of an overseas property selling site. My main tasks were to add a non-flash menu to the site (at present only the homepage was indexed!), and to add links to the ‘View property’ pages (because at present they used buttons for moving to the next page - again a bad idea because only the first page of results would be spidered and indexed.)
I also set up a sitemap generator to automatically create and submit a sitemap to Google as well as create a HTML sitemap for their own site. This is where I noticed this particular problem - the sitemap generator I use (created by the good folks at XML sitemaps) uses the page title tag as the link text in the HTML sitemap, and in this case for all 100 properties currently listed it looked like this:
Millennium Property Corp. Properties listing
(That’s right - one hundred pages with exactly the same title - names have been changed to protect the guilty!)
Besides the impact on the sitemap, this has the following problems:
- when the pages are finally indexed in Google, the text that is displayed as the link whenever their pages show up in the search results will be as above - i.e. not very descriptive, and particularly unhelpful when many pages are listed next to each other
- people who have visited their site, who might be trying to find a particular page that they have already seen will see this same undescriptive title when they look back through their browser history
- if anybody saves more than one property to their favorites/bookmarks then again, you guessed it, the same undescriptive title will be used.
So, what to do to resolve this?
Well, for a start, there is no need for the company name to be at the front of the title tag. There are countless studies out there that show that closeness to the start of the title tag will improve SEO results, and so the most competitive keywords should be at the start of the title tag. (It is unlikely many sites will compete for the keywords ‘Millennium Property Corp.’)
Property is one of the most competitive keywords out there, and so this should be moved to the front instead (and the repeat in the name of the company will help with keyword density.)
Secondly, there is no reason why the information on the individual properties shouldn’t be held in the title tag - in fact, this is particularly useful in coming up for long-tail keyword phrases i.e. someone looking for a 5 bedroom villa in Quinta Do Lago. Now the property title is already available from the database information returned, as it is displayed within the page, so including it in the title is a piece of cake.
So, with very little work, the title could be reformatted to be:
Property: 5 bedroom villa in Quinta Do Lago | Millennium Property Corp. Property Listings
(and so on, giving a unique and descriptive title for each and every page)
This overcomes all of the problems mentioned above, and will have positive effects in search engine result positions and usability for site visitors.
thanks. been needing help with this for awhile now