How To Define The Goals Of A Web Page

Title And Content

If you're reading this online, look up at the top of the window showing your browser. You should see "Title And Content - Getting The Right Visitors From Search Engines". That is the HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) title of this web page. It need not appear on the page itself, though in this case, I use the first three words at the top of the pages in the rest right about this text. The title is also the highlighted text you saw in the first line of the search engine result listing this site, if you arrived here by direct search. If you use the

View>Source

option in Internet Explorer or the

View>Page Source

option in Mozilla Firefox, it will show you the underlying HTML code for the page you are looking at. The HTML title is the bit between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags. Of all the simple things you can do to maximize the chances of people finding your site for a particular term or phrase, putting it in the HTML title is the most important. Because the title is entirely in the control of the person creating the web page, the search engines know it could be nothing but a lie. So simply putting a key phrase into the title isn't enough to get your site visibility in the search results unless there is no competition at all. But, the search engines also look to the title as the main opportunity for the honest website creator to succinctly tell people (and search engines) what the writer believes is the essence of the page. I can't even begin to count how many sites I've reviewed for authors where the pages had no title, or the title of every page was the same as the main page. Those designers are just begging the search engines NOT to send them visitors.

Let's take the example of a website about Education Reform. You might have determined the key terms you want distinct web pages to address are: classroom size, teacher training, self directed studies, student mentoring, disciplinary actions, testing and grading, etc... Starting with Classroom Size, what do you think of this for a title:

"Too Many Students Spoils The Educational Process"

Kind of catchy, but there's a problem. Neither word from the key term, Classroom Size, appears in the title. If "Classroom Size" is in fact the key term you've settled on, you've just shot yourself in the foot. Some web page designers would suggest you simply title the page

"Classroom Size"

But I like a longer title myself, like

"Classroom Size - Too Many Students Spoils The Educational Process"

In most instances, there will be more than one key term or phrase you have in mind, and you should get them all into a manageable title if possible. But I'm also an advocate of making the title natural language, rather than a laundry list of terms separated by commas. Not only do search engines look in askance at laundry lists of terms, but people see the title tag in search results, and are less likely to click on a site that looks like a spam trap.

Now let's look at the next term, "teacher training". How's this for a title

"Teacher Training - Making Our Schools A Better Place For Everyone"

Great, got the key term in, but the rest of the title is thrown away, with the exception of the word "Schools", it could apply to anything. Also, search engines aren't real good (yet) at crediting different forms of a noun or a verb as a close match, and word order matters as well. So to maximize the chance of the page being found for our key term, in the conceptual sense, I'd try something like.

"Teacher Training - Reforming The Process to Train Teachers

Here you get a double-bang for your buck. Two forms of the verb "train" and two forms of the noun "teacher" in both orders. We also worked in a form of the verb "reform" from the main site theme. Now it's not an ideal or universal title for the concept on the page, I'd have to read the page first to come up with a real title, but concept of going after your key term with both barrels has so far proved a sound one in web page design.

Since we're running a self directed course in web page design here, let's move onto the next key term from our example "self directed studies". Here's a made-up paragraph from that hypothetical site that we'll take a typical of the whole page"

"Students who take on a portion of the responsibility for their educational goals outperform their peers 73% of the time, providing those goals are clearly understood. We advocate creating a written contract with the student defining those goals and providing a curricula to help the student achieve those goals in measurable increments. Peer pressure from students who aren't pursuing an independent course of study are a major source of disruption in the progressive educational environment. We therefore recommend that all self directed studies being with intensive training in verbal self defense and conflict management. In extreme cases, it may be necessary to train the gifted program participants in the martial arts, or to arm them with purely defensive weapons, such as stun guns, to exercise at their discretion. It is our belief that these measures can be justified if the resulting scores for the school are sufficiently bolstered to prevent reductions of government funding as per the Federal Education Reform Act of 2013."

Now pretend you are a search engine, and the paragraph above goes on in this fashion for ten or twenty more paragraphs. As a search engine which doesn't understand English as much as it analyses words and patterns, you might guess there's something in there about education reform and self directed studies. You might also think there's something in there about contracts, about the defense budget, and sports, given all the references to goals, training and exercise. It's not easy being a search engine. So after counting words and analysing semantics for signs of intelligent purpose, you, the search engine, would check if there were any external links pointing at the page that would help you determine what it's all about. You'd also look at the internal site navigation and at the page headings, which we'll get to in a minute. But you'd mainly hope and pray to the digital gods that the title would tell you what it's really all about. If the title is:

"Self Directed Studies - Empowering Students To Direct Their Own Education"

you could happily conclude that self directed studies, and the related terms of empowerment, direct and education, fairly describe what it's all about. Depending on the competition and linking, you, the search engine, might rank the page quite highly for some key terms. But lets say the title was

"Self Defense At School - Direct Weapons Training For Students"

then that's what the search engine would think it was about, and the exact same page would be more likely to draw visitors looking for self defense training resources than for anything remotely related to education reform. It's not a fault on the part of the search engine, it's a fault on the part of the page designer who gave the page the misleading title. This is one of those odd cases where the search engine would probably have done a better job guessing what the page was all about in the absence of any title information, since it was so far off base. I gave an extreme example to make it obvious, but stay away from allegorical elegance when titling web pages. Search engines don't get allegory. And the title of this web page your reading now is the main way the search engines will have of figuring out that it's not primarily about education reform!

Once you get the page title right, you have some flexibility with the headlines or headers. There are the on-page headlines, which are often identical to the HTML title, but don't have to be by any means. They aren't as important as the title, and their value in defining what your content is about probably decreases as their number increases. I very rarely use more than two, only if a page covers more than one major subject which is just bad design practice in any case. If you look at the underlying HTML using in the browser as we described above, headers show up in tags that look like:

<H1>A Header Goes Here</H1>

<H2>A Header or Subtopic Goes Here</H2>

If you look at enough modern web pages, you'll find that many jettison header notation in favor of fine control typography, defining the font and the size for all the text on the page. In doing so, they give up some ability in influencing how the search engine views the page. Smart search engines may take into account the strength of the text use, giving a little weigh to bold or italic fonts or large sizes, but it's a lot clearer and simpler to use the standard header notation.