Google Uses Header Tags or Link Text to Create Unique Titles

Google Adds Header Tag or Link Text before page title in Search Results

Google has decided to help websites which have the same title site wide. It usually attaches the H1 tag in front of the site wide title. If the H1 tag is not present it adds the H2, H3 up to H6 or even the link text. e.g XYZ Beach Huts Palolem Goa - Welcome To ABC Tours and Travels . Here Welcome To ABC Tours and Travels is the site wide title and XYZ Beach Huts Palolem Goa is the H1 header on that particular page. In case none of the above are available it even uses the other headers up to H6 and attaches them in front of the title. If the header tags are not available Google uses the link text and attaches it at the beginning of the title as seen below.




Even this rescue act is performed for only the first 12 pages or so up to a maximum of 20.
    The importance of the title is so great that the sites which had no ranking whatsoever for the inner pages now manage to rank in the first 5 pages (50 results) of google's results for some low competition keywords. If their header tag H1 was well optimized and had otherwise an extremely good relevance to the topic being searched.

   Just imagine the returns if the website was fully optimized. However even such websites are completely out of luck in Yahoo, MSN as well as other search engines.

Unique titles and their Role in Getting the Site Indexed

Unique titles can even play a role in indexing. If all titles as well as descriptions are the same some search engines believe that all pages have the same or nearly same content. As an example a travel agency site has only 46 pages indexed by Yahoo while Bing has just 2 pages indexed. There are more than 300 pages in the Google index.
   Note that without being indexed the page has no chance of being featured in the results and the more pages that are in the index the higher the page rank of the home page for very large sites.

Spammy Titles Penalized Badly

On the other hand websites using titles the length of a description have been penalised very badly. In this case some times Google uses no title at all with very disastrous consequences to the ranking.

Requirements For A Search Engine Friendly Website Structure

Search Engine Friendly website Structure

I had briefly explained the importance of site structure in my last post. I had mentioned that the title is the most important factor in Search Engine Optimization. Besides that it is also very useful to have an unique description for each page. The description is often shown by the search engines below the title as a snippet in the search results. I had at one time have a look at a website which the site owners wanted to optimize. The site in question belonged to a leading travel travel agency and an office at a prominent place in one of the state capitals of India. They had paid a handsome amount just to setup the Content management system.

    The CMS in question could not even generate unique titles for each page, let alone the other tags such as descriptions. The url just contains a number to reference the page. The actual content of the home page started out at page 5 in the Lynx browser . Lynx if you are not yet aware is a text based browser which closely resembles the way search engine bots like Google bot index web pages. In fact the Google webmaster guidelines suggest use of Lynx to identify any potential accessibility problems in your website.

Such a website CANNOT be optimized.

Minimum Requirements of Search Engine Friendly CMS

The minimum requirement is that required is at least the ability to have an unique page title for each page and all the pages of the site should be accessible. The other strongly recommended features is a unique description for each page as well as a search engine friendly url if possible. Search engine friendly extensions may be required for certain Content Management Systems. The latest version of Joomla has a URL rewriting feature built in but it has to be activated from the control panel and Apache Mod rewrite has to be enabled by the web host. Wordpress requires an extension to enable unique descriptions as well as some other Seo features.

    Now, coming back to the site that I was discussing. The only page that can be optimized for such a website is the home page. This can be achieved by inserting the necessary tags in the code of the CMS. However these tags will be the same for each and every page of the site.