Most adults and children are very familiar with that cuddly bear named Winnie-the-Pooh, first introduced to the world by author A. A. Milne in 1926 in his book of the same title. And while Winnie-the-Pooh wasn’t the brightest creature in the Hundred Acre Woods, his creator can teach us a few things about how to improve search engine rankings.
Two keys to getting better rankings on the internet are effective page titles and descriptions. In the print world, these page titles and descriptions can be compared to the chapter headings in a book’s table of contents. This is where Winnie-the-Pooh comes in.
A Table of Contents Example
Let’s take a look at the first part of the table of contents from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh:
Chapter 1: In Which We are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, and the Stories Begin
Chapter 2: In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets Into a Tight Place
Chapter 3: In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle
…
From looking at the table of contents, you could very quickly get an idea of what the chapter is going to be about, because the author is using effective keywords.
Now imagine if the table of contents looked like this instead:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
…
Do you still want to pick up the book and read it? Probably not. Effective titles and descriptions make all the difference.
Titles and Descriptions on the Internet
When users go to a search engine looking for information, the search engine gives back pages of information that are similar to a table of contents. The better the page titles and descriptions in the search results, the more likely you are to bring visitors to your site.
But how do you define titles and descriptions for a website?
How To Define and Title and Description on a Website
Web page titles and descriptions are defined in special pieces of HTML code called metatags. Both of these metatags are located in the header of the web page. The title is defined by a pair of tags named, not surprisingly, Title tags. A title metatag looks like this:
<title>This is my page title</title>
The text between the HTML open and close tags is what shows up as the underlined headings in search engine results. It also shows up at the top left of your web browser when you navigate to the page.
The description metatag is a self-contained tag and looks like this:
<meta content="This is the page description"/>
The text that follows the “content=” part of the tag will frequently show up as the text beneath the underlined headings on the search results page.
Both of these tags should appear in the heading of the web page, some time after the opening <head> tag and the closing </head> tag.
Now that you know where to find or create these tags, let’s look at what makes for a good title and description.
Elements of Great Titles and Descriptions
First, every page of your website should have a unique title and description. You don’t have two any identical pages on your site, so why would you have duplicate information about the pages?
Next, the title should contain the keywords that are most relevant to the page. You can use a free tool such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to determine which keywords or keyword phrases to use. The most important keywords should be at the beginning of the title text.
The description should also contain your keywords, and it should be interesting enough to make the web user want to click on the page link to read more. Think of the description as a summary of what the page is about. Look back at the chapter headings in Winnie-the-Pooh and see how the author tantalizes you with his chapter descriptions. Your page descriptions should create the same kind of curiosity in web users — compelling them to click through to your website.
So now that you know what good titles and descriptions should have, let’s review what the search engine currently displays for your website’s pages.
What Do the Search Engines See for Your Site?
In all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing), you use the same command to get a “table of contents” of your website.
The command is simply this:
site:www.yourdomainname.com
So if I wanted to see how Google has indexed the pages of Website Remedies, I would go to Google’s home page and type the following command in the search box:
site:www.websiteremedies.com
This command will bring back a list of all the pages that have been indexed by Google. I can look at the results and very quickly see if my titles and descriptions are all unique, keyword-rich and compelling.
So what do the search engines do if you haven’t defined these metatags?
What if My Page is Missing a Metatag?
If you’re missing these metatags, the search engine is going to take some educated guesses about what to display in the search results. If you don’t have a Title metatag, the page link will simply default to the name of the file on your web server. So if your home page didn’t have a title, and assuming the home page was defined in a file called index.html, the search engine would display “index.html” as the page title. Finding a page without a title metatag is pretty rare these days, but many pages still don’t have a Description metatag.
If you don’t have a Description metatag defined, the search engine will most likely take the first 150 characters it finds on the page and display those beneath the underlined page title in the results. If your page is cleanly coded, you may get lucky and have the search engine list the first 150 characters from the first paragraph on your page. Unfortunately, if the first 150 characters it finds are just navigation links, it will display those under the findings — not a very compelling reason for the visitor to click through in that case.
The bottom line is, the Title and Description metatags give you a chance to tell the search engines what you want them to display about you. It’s like writing your own introduction instead of relying on someone else to introduce you. Well-written metatags will drive new visitors to your website, which should make you as happy as Winnie-the-Pooh with a full pot of honey.
