DRG Blog

Check those page titles and description meta tags on your website.

Have you ever searched a keyword phrase and when the results were returned there were entries on the search page titled “Untitled Page” or the title of the entry did not make any sense or correlate with the phrase you typed in? Google is helping to make sure this problem goes away in their search results. . .

The technical term for those pesky “untitled pages” is Page Title. It’s not technically a meta tag, but it is a part of the source code header on your website pages. It also shows up at the bottom of your browser to help you know a little more about the page your viewing. In the past many website designers would simply put the same page title on all pages - it’s easy and fast, but not very effective in communicating to your audience exactly what each page in your website is all about.

Google now provides your webmaster with a tool to check all pages in your website for Page Titles and to confirm they are within the acceptable character limit and not duplicated on pages within your site. Google also offers this same type of diagnostic tool for the meta tag called “Description”. Both play an important role in search engine optimization and should not be ignored by the site owner.

With that in mind, comes my second tip of the new year -

• Verify all pages in your website have a unique page title
• Confirm that the length of the page title is within 64 characters
• Verify all pages within your website have unique description meta tags
• Confirm that the length of the description meta tag is within the display limit of 158 characters

Not the webmaster of your website? Not a problem. You can check this yourself before making the call to your webmaster for assistance. Just go to Google and in the search bar type in site: www.mywebsite.com and look at the results returned. It should be a comprehensive listing of all the pages in your website and each entry will show you the page title and the description meta tag.