The Great Untitled Document Disaster
By Gerard McGarry on 5th September 2005, filed in Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design & Standards. You can leave a response below.
Do you run a website? As part of a business venture or a hobby you adore? How do people find your site? Is it the loyal fanbase, hanging on every carefully-typed word? Maybe your visitors see your URL on advertisements and stationery?
Or maybe the most of them find you through a little search site called Google. Possibly Yahoo or MSN.
The subject of today’s sermon, dear brethern, is using the title tag. Most web design packages start a new page with some generic text. Dreamweaver, for instance, will use “Untitled Document”. Microsoft Frontpage will use “New Page” by default. To publish a professional web page with “Untitled Document” or “New Page” as the title makes you look amateurish.
Take a look on Google, Yahoo or MSN. A search for “Untitled Document” in Google returns 10,300,000 documents. Yahoo has 79,600,000, while MSN returns 47,000,000 results (at time of writing). You’ll find the same thing – to a lesser extent – by searching for “New Page” too.
What’s The Big Deal About Title Tags?
Why is this important? Search engines rely on the title of a web page to determine what the document is about. A search engine will scan all the text on your page, but gives higher rating to paricular parts of the document. The title area is the most important part of the document!!
More importantly, many search engines display the title tag in the results. If your page returns “Untitled Document”, who’s going to look at it? It’s as unprofessional as sending an email with a blank subject line! You do fill in the subject line, don’t you?
Helping The Search Engines To Help You
Search engines exist to help people find information. If the pages on your website have missing or inappropriate titles, you will miss out on traffic from the search engines.
Look at your website. Each page is important, and each page has a different message. Do not have a generic title on all of your pages! Look at the content of each page and vary the title according to what that document is about. Read the page. Pick out the keywords in the text, the words people might use to find that document, and craft them into an informative page title.
If you use blogging software, your page titles should be generated automatically accoring to the title of the page. However, you can refine this too. Modify the title generator to include category names or tag names (if you use these features). If you use categories effectively, you will be adding other relevant keywords that might not exist in your title, making your page more attractive to search engines.
Need More Help?
If you’d like any more information or advice on improving your website titles (or any other aspect of your website), please get in touch. If necessary, we can conduct an audit of your existing site and make recommendations as to how you can improve your search engine ranking in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
My website comes up in google as an “Untitled Document.” However, I have given the site a title many times. Still doesn’t work. It shows up in my code and I have titled others sites successfully. Any idea why this doesn’t work for my page?
Thanks,
Adam
Dear Adam,
No need to panic, the title of your webpage come with title in google after some time, once Google crawls on your page. Try to write some blogs and articles in web and mention your webpage there to make google to notice your web site early.
Rajeev