Jenna Ryan, President
The Marketing Shop.com
November 2006

Page Names & Titles for SEO
Search Engines Optimization Series

When titling your web pages, it's important to use keyword phrases for search engine optimization. Before creating any webpage, you should decide on a Main Keyword Phrase for that page. The page title being described is the name of the actual page, what you save the page as. This page title will show up in your browser's address bar.

SEO Page Names

When saving your webpage, it's important to use hyphens between the keyword phrases because search engines cannot always read words that are smushed together. They see smushed words as one big word.

Example:

Wrong:   (searchengineoptimization.php) or (searchengineoptimization.html)

Correct:  (search-engine-optimization.php) or (search-engine-optimization.html)

Keyword Duplications in Page Name

Google does not tolerate duplicate keyword phraseology in one URL. If you use more than one keyword phrase in your URL, the page will be forever "dunked" or de-listed from the search engines. It cannot be reinstated unless the duplication is corrected.

Example:

Wrong:   http://www.frisco-celina-prosper.com/frisco-real-estate.php

Correct:   http://www.frisco-celina-prosper.com/real-estate.php

SEO Page Titles

Another type of title for your webpage and for the search engines is the actual "page title" which is different from the name of the page (as if you weren't confused already).

The Page Title is located in your website's Meta Tags. Meta Tags communicate information to the Browser. Hint: To view meta Tags, go to View/Source in your browser.

Whenever possible, use the same Page Title as your Page Name. This is good optimization and search engines will reward you for it.

Home Page SEO

The Home page must contain a little of all keywords and the homepage is always entitled "index.php."