8 March 2016

SEO Search Engine Optimisation

Give Your Web Pages a Little Labelling and a Lot of Love

Sometimes, although cheaper, it can be harder remodelling an existing website than starting one from scratch. You already have the existing framework and can’t seem to get that out of your head when thinking about what you need to do. Only when you compare your website to one that already exists can you truly see what and how much needs updating.

But with so many aspects of web design and SEO to consider when remodelling your website, it’s hard to know where to start and this is why getting expert help is never a bad idea.

One of the most important aspects that amalgamate both web design and SEO is making sure that all your web pages are correctly labelled. By this, we mean allocating a proper title tag in the head tag of the HTML document. If this is getting too technical, we can think of it more simply – ensure that each of your web pages are labelled correctly by using the help of a web designer so that both the user and search engine can clearly see what the page is about.

These tags or labels need to be thought about, as you only have a short phrase to play around with and this is what will determine whether or not a user clicks on your website. This is because the title tag that you (or your web designer) types is what appears in the search results when a browser enters a query into a Search Engine such as Google.

An example of a title tag circled in red

If you are stuck on what your title tag should say, think about the main message or keyword of that particular page. If you're an E-Commerce store selling stationary, for instance, you may want the pens page of your website to say something along the lines of:

Company name | Stationary supplies | Pens

Remember you only have a certain amount of characters so if you go above that, only the first few characters will show. We recommend not going above 70 characters – short and sweet title tags get the message across more succinctly and provide a way to optimise user experience itself.

Although this may largely seem like common sense, you would be surprised how much this aspect of web design is overlooked.

Try to narrow down the words you use based on what you would put in the query box if you were looking for a particular item and try not to be either too vague or too specific. Using the example of FDC, for instance, this would be too broad:

FDC Studio | Websites | Award Winning

Whereas something like this may be too specific:

FDC Studio| Furniture store web design

Unless, of course, this was an exclusive service we offered.

Remember that the whole point of having title tags is so that you can have more specific titles for each page on your website therefore having the same generalized title for each page completely defeats the purpose of doing this.

So, as you can see, although it seems simple on the surface, there is a lot of thought that goes into title tags and as they are so important, if you are not sure how to go about it, contact FDC and see how we can help.