We try to put as much effort into Search Engine Optimisation as we can since there´s no point in having a series of web ventures if no-one knows they even exist. When it comes down to it only the people who wrote the algorithm that the search engines use know how it works. You have to use a lot of trial and error, research and time to get a formula that works.
 
Google is still the worlds most used search engine so if you can get on to the front page for your search terms then your doing well. The other big search engines (MSN, Yahoo) use different algorithms and seem to put more emphasis on the content in the page, but google seems to put more emphasis on the page title and incoming links to the page.

 
So the way to get to the top is to have links all over the place with the link text made up of the same keywords as the page they link to. Its a bit more complicated than that since you have to take PR (not Public Relations…) into account but it works.
 
Now back to the web development bit since that is the point of this whole website… programming "tidbits". If you have a large database driven site the chance is that a template is used to generate the internal pages, so the page title is something along the lines of "company name: company motto" and depending on how your code is made up then dynamically shoving this in might not be possible.
 
<american-infomercial-voice>Fortunately there is an answer</american-infomercial-voice> in the form of javascript. By shoving a script tag in the page after you´ve gotten your content from the db then you can use document.title = "Database driven page title"; in the script tags to change the page title after it loads. It works in all the browsers I´ve tried it in and also in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 5th, 2005 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.