The Importance of Unique Page Titles and Descriptions

It is often discussed whether it is important to have unique page titles, descriptions, and keywords for each page of your web site. While you will be able to get away with not using the META keywords tag, you definitely want to use both the page title, and META descriptions, but remember to make them unique to each page on your web site.

First let’s look at how the search engine works. Spiders crawl the web and grab as much content (including links) from every web site they can find. This process is infinite and the spider just keeps sending content back to the search engine servers for processing. The algorithm then sorts through all the content that is sent by the spider and has to determine what is on each page, what the content is about, and how relevant that page is to each search that is conducted at the search engine. Our job as search engine opimizers is to make this task as simple as possible, by helping the algorithm see the differences between each page.

With the release of our new web site, I didn’t initially add unique page titles or descriptions to all of the pages. The most important thing was getting the site finished and launched, I thought I’d leave the finer details once the site was already live. A couple days after launching the new site, I went to google and saw that we were already indexed (GREAT!!), but then I found that they were only returning 5 or 6 pages in the search results, and saying that 20 or so other pages were found but were too similar so they weren’t displayed (NOT GREAT).

This is a common problem with search engines spiders, as they have to read your content and get to know what your page is about. If they find that a majority of your pages are too similar they will only show a couple of them. The spider’s task is to get all the content from your site and then the search engine algorithm analyzes your content to determine what each page is about. If they cannot differentiate between your pages or determine that too many of them are too similar then you have a problem.

Here’s the solution. Make sure that each page on your site has unique content and enough of it, typically this is around 4-500 words. Second, make sure that your descriptions and titles are unique and related to the pages content. When the spider reads your descriptions and titles and finds that they’re the same, it is too difficult to differentiate amongst your pages, and is less likely to return that page in the search results. So you need to be able to show the spiders that each page is unique, not only with unique content, but by also adding unique page descriptions and titles.

Once I updated my page descriptions and titles, my page count went way up in Google, and there were a lot less results that were held back for being too similar. There are still a couple pages that are deemed similar, (mostly parts of the Net Shift journal, and our portflio section), but the content heavy area of the site is now easily indexed and understood by search engines.