This is so insignificant I’m almost embarrassed to post, however I don’t seem to be able to work it out so any help welcome. I have added page titles for the half dozen pages on a new site I’m working on and in the hope that the SEO is helped by these I have called them all “Lambourn Racing Productions” (the name of the company I’m doing the site for) this name followed by a description of the page (eg “Home Page”). This title is now quite long (number of characters) so when I view my project, because of the width of the site panel I can’t see the page name, I can, of course, change the width of the site panel but then it almost fills my monitor or I could rename the page so the page description is at the beginning of the page name but don’t know how this affects SEO … how do you chaps name these bits ? many thanks and I’m sorry this is so boring. Regards Roger
Hi, I don’t think it’s the best idea to have the description and title on the title line! You should just call each page whatever is relevant to that page…not all the same. Also, either use a meta tag to show what the description should be or let the search engines read the content of the page and figure out…either way it usually works!
Another option is this: for the main/home page you call it the main name (ie. “Lambourn Racing Productions”) then for sub-pages such as an ‘About Us’ page use a colon to add more info whilst still retaining the page name (ie. “Lambourn Racing Productions : About Us") - I think they do it this way on the Softpress Website (www.softpress.com)
Excellent Fergus, thank you. I read somewhere that meta tags, at least with Google, were a bit of a waste of time but then I’m really new to the SEO thing and am still struggling to get my head around it, I’ll try digging deeper and also check out the rest of your advice. Best Roger
You need to have some sort of description on the page and I always put my site name title in the title part. So for instance you could put:
Lambourn Racing Productions :: Your Source For Productions for Lambourn Racing
Then other pages could be:
Lambourn Racing Productions :: About Us
It helps to have your site name in there so if another page on your site is searched for other than your home page then it’ll still look like it’s connected to your site.
Google does take description meta tags and you could toss them on every page, but usually you do just the home page. It’s up to you.
Did you watch the video on entering META tags on FreewayCast.com?
Thanks Dan, excellent tutorial and I’ve added meta tags now, a little aside, is there any reason you’ve used a double colon in you example above (: ? and to just go back to my problem, when I view the site panel I can’t see the page name, this could get very irritating with a big site and hundreds of pages … please see this example as a screen grab:
There used to be an action something like Rename Page - I think a FW3 action - that may be able to help you out here. Found it - Retitle Page - one of Tim Plumb’s http://www.freewayactions.com/product.php?id=014
Once downloaded you will need to add .fwaction to the filename before you can install it into FW5.
In use if you keep the short version of your page name in FW eg contact; details etc and Enter your full Page Title that you want to be displayed as ‘Lambourn racing charity race nights…contact etc’ in the action palette you will only see the short version in the Site Panel.
The :: in question was just a design choice. I’ve used that along with » and | or //. Just something to mix it up a bit and add a design touch to it. Nothing that help or hurt your page ranking, just a small touch.
Nice action, hadn’t seen it. I could have used it for a project earlier, too bad a folder action couldn’t be had with it.
? and to just go back to my problem, when I view the site panel I can’t see the page name, this could get very irritating with a big site and hundreds of pages … please see this example as a screen grab: