Page titles test
From SiteRay wiki
| SiteRay Test | |
|---|---|
| First appeared: | Sitescore 1.0 |
| Applies to: | All versions |
| Type: | Individual test |
| Scored: | Always |
What does it do?
Test whether page titles are used on the website correctly. In Sitescore, a page title exclusively refers to the <title> tag of a page, and nothing else. See also Heading.
Why is it important?
All pages should have a title – this is one of the most crucial elements of a page, and can be most easily seen in the top left corner of your web browser’s window:
Example results
How is it measured?
The title is particularly important for several reasons:
- Search engines pay particular attention to the words in your page titles. They are emphasised more than the text in your pages, and help optimise you for those words.
- Search engines display the titles (usually) as links in their results. The phrase that Google uses to link to a webpage is nearly always the title of that page.
- Titles are used when users create bookmarks.
Titles should always be on every webpage, but it is important that the titles are varied and appropriate.
Algorithm
Sitescore examines the title for each page in turn, and checks:
- Is there a title? (nearly every webpage will have one)
- Is the title meaningless? (e.g. "Untitled document")
- Is the title a web address (non descriptive and frowned on by search engines)
- Is the title too long?
- Is the title too complex?
Pages which appear to contain redirections are ignored. The final score is reduced proportionally by the number of poor or absent titles found, depending on the severity of each problem.
Shortcomings
It has been suggested this test could be extended to identify non-unique titles, which are particularly beneficial from an SEO perspective. Such a revision would penalise sites where many pages repeat the same title (suprisingly common, and bad practice).
How to use this test effectively
This test should usually score highly, for most well built websites. If not, this is one of the highest priorities to fix (and also one of the easiest), particularly for Search Engine Optimisation.
