What's in a Title (Tag)?
I come from a recruitment background and, by chance, found myself building a job board - https://www.thejobsboard.co.uk/
A job board is simply an online platform where job vacancies are advertised.
That is where the simplicity ends! Job boards are complex things that need a lot of knowledge and technical skills to build and keep up to date.
I don't have web development skills, so I use a generalist web development company - Beachshore Design. They are great, and we have been on a learning journey together for the last five years. What tends to happen is that I read an article about "How to Make Your Job Board Much More Fabulous!" and we then try to work out if we can do it, how long it will take and how much it will cost.
So, when I read James Reynolds's post about title tags from SEO Sherpa, I wanted to check it out.
The world of SEO is another minefield; websites have all these oddly named bits, such as "title tags", "headers", "H1s, H2s, etc". For laypeople, they are confusing and intimidating. I have started reading articles about SEO and given up after three sentences as I don't understand what is being said.
James' post made sense, and I distilled it down to what he felt was the optimum way to write title tags. As I understand it, the title is the bit that tells a search engine what the page is about. So, getting it right can make a big difference in getting your page(s) seen.
The piece of code that identifies your page title looks like this:
<title>Head of Operations Job in Tonbridge | thejobsboard.co.uk</title>
Or it should do.
For a job board, it is important to get the name of the job, then the fact that the page is a job advert, where the job is and a promotion for the website.
Apparently, you need to restrict the number of characters – enough to explain what it is, but not too many to confuse things.
After working this out, the Beachshore team coded the title tag and then updated all the website pages.
If you didn't know, Google does not respond to website changes immediately. It needs to consider them for a while before deciding whether your pages should rank higher in people's search results.
So, I am hopeful that this recent piece of SEO craft will lead to better results, but it will be a few weeks before I know.
Web development and SEO are ongoing processes, so it is important to keep learning and making the changes. The results will come.
November 2024: Original Content written by Tony Line.
