Use descriptive page titles

This is probably one of the quickest and easiest things you can do to improve the search engine ranking for your charity's website. The page title is the text that appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser. It also appears in the search engine results.

Having a good page title is important because:

1. It tells search engines what your charity's website is about. If your page title includes your important keywords, it will encourage search engines to associate the page with those keywords.
2. People are more likely to click on a link that has a relevant and well-written page title. This will increase the search engine rankings of your charity's website over time as Google monitors the popularity of pages. People are particularly likely to click through if the title includes the keywords they searched for as these will be highlighted (Google highlights in bold any occurrence of the search terms on the result page).

Don't use full sentences in your page title, but include a phrase that is grammatically correct. Simply writing a list of keywords in the title will make your charity's website look like a spam site and will discourage users from clicking through.

On my website I write the topic (and sub-topic) of the page, followed by the name of my company and what it does, with each detail separated by a vertical bar (|). By adding a tag line after your charity's name you can help your ranking with these keywords. For example, my tag line is 'charity PR, marketing and fundraising agency', which links me to the keywords 'charity', 'PR', 'marketing', 'fundraising' and 'agency'.

Keep your page title concise - try to use less than 65 characters, as any characters after this will be cut off in the search results page, although they will still appear on the blue bar of the browser.