Get Google to Notice You with Coordinated Page Titles
Here's a trick: Google loves it when you correlate the titles of your pages with the URL and the content header. It's the kind of consistency that tells Google you have well defined content. But it might seem like a lot of work or too technical for some people. Here's our solution.
What We're Talking About
Before we explain the easy solution, let's explain the situation. There are three places to find the title of a page, and you want all three of them to match to get Google results.
- Page Title: This appears at the very top edge of your browser window, above everything else. It comes from the HTML code in the header of the page. To activate it, someone has to enter your title code like this: <title>My Page Title</title>, and make sure it falls in the "<head>" portion of the HTML code.
- URL: This is the address of the page, or the actual filename of the page being loaded. Again, this usually takes a coder or someone with FTP access to the host server.
- Content Title: This is the title inside the page and at the top of the text. It should be identified with HTML header tags, which make it appear larger and allow Google to single it out as a title. Once again, to be properly tagged, it needs a coder.
The Automated Solution
Our Drupal installations are configured to do all this for you automatically. There is a title field for every node, which Drupal displays both as the Page Title and the Content Title, complete with proper HTML tags. For the URL, the system uses a module we've installed, called Pathauto, which also uses the Title field, replacing the spaces with dashes and inserting it as 'simulated' filename.
Our colleagues are reporting that this method of taking content, whether it be blogs, products, directories or plain old about pages, helps tremendously with Google rankings. It's also one more good reason for you to continually write new content for your site!
