I have been asked the question by a web developer:
“I’m working on a site for a private school (approximate ages 5-18).
Since the school doesn’t target students outside of the metro area, I
wrote code to only put the school’s name in every title tag.
But for SEO, how important do you think the school’s location is for
the title tag? And a broader question: What would you recommend I put
as standard text in title tags across the site?”
You raise several points. Firstly, we know that Google looks closely at the title tag in order to determine what a web page is about and that each page is treated separately by Google. Thus if the title tags are all the same with just the name of the school in them then we have a potential duplicate content issue with Google and pages will be held back in the rankings potentially. At least there will be a loss of value for many of the pages with Google. Good SEO practices dictate that title tags should be different for each page and should be relevant to the page content, so its fine to put the name of the school in all title tags but also add some content to the tags that is relevant to the page. For instance “XYZ School | curriculum” for the curriculum page, “XYZ School | suburb | city” for the Location page etc.
Google is moving more and more towards local search and has been for several years. This is set to increase and we already see local results appearing in the Google Web searches. The fact that the school doesn’t target outside of the metro area means that undertaking geographic SEO targeting is also beneficial in terms of keeping the school out of search results for non target areas and keeping irrelevant enquiries as a result, down. You can add a Meta location tag to all pages to assist Google to identify the location of the school.
Author: Ashley Bryan
Webstrategies
Subscribe to our RSS feed
Receive Webstrategies blog posts by Email
www.webstrategies.co.nz
Download the Webstrategies Service List