Summing it up with page titles
February 06, 2012 | Shawn Smalley — View Recent Posts
Happy Monday everyone! It may seem obvious to summarize your page in the title, but you may not know why it's so important. And that's why I'm here...
A “page title” shows in your browser’s title bar when your site is open, which is where you’ve most likely encountered the page title. However, it’s more than that. The page title is also what search engines turn into the clickable link to your website when you come up as a search result. So before anyone even pulls up your site the title of the page sets a first impression as they read it before seeing any of your site’s other contents. If you title the page as a brief summary of what is on the page then it gives the visitor a better idea of if they should check out that link or not.
For example, here’s a page title that covers a few basic things you may have on your own website: “Oklahoma City real estate – find OKC homes for sale, property search, advice selling your home, or apartments for rent”. There I cover both “Oklahoma City” and “OKC”, “real estate” and “homes for sale”, key phrases like “property search”, “selling”, “for rent” and so forth. That brief phrase covers a lot of ground for possible keyword matches.
Don’t worry about putting everything into a page title, though, because this is actually set on a per page basis. This works to your advantage because if you have a few unrelated areas of your website then you can ensure the page titles for each page are super-specific. So, I might use that long summary on my homepage (to make sure it summarizes a lot of my business overall), but I might take my rentals page and go a little more niche-friendly with something like this: “Oklahoma City Rentals – Find apartments for rent in the OKC Metro area, duplexes, multi-family units, property search”.
That one page now covers lots of rental-specific ground which would have taken a lot of room to try and cover if I tried to squeeze it into the homepage’s page title as well. So, the homepage’s page title summarizes and sub-pages’ page titles emphasize.
