Rich’s WebWorld

I added a couple of pages to my site, Easy Diabetic Diets, a few days ago. When I checked Yahoo to see if the pages were listed, I discovered listings without any titles.

Page titles are extremely important for SEO purposes. Keywords placed there help search engines know the subject of the page and how to rank them. Of course, you also need those keywords repeated on the page. Titles should be unique to the page. That means pages should be strong in just one or two keyword phrases.

Because those page were dynamically generated, I looked at the code that generated the titles. At first glance, I thought I failed to pass a variable to the code that looked up the page title. It seemed like it would be a laborious challenge to change my code to make it work.

Fortunately, I didn’t jump in immediately to make the change. I like to see if my subconscious mind has a better solution. It was when I came back later that I realized I had changed the name of a field in my database table from “id” to “pg” (mentioned in a previous post). I had failed to update the script that uses that field name to get the page title.

With this change, I updated my sitemaps and resubmitted them to Google and Yahoo. Hopefully, this will result in better rankings for those pages.

– Rich Pulham