Checking Each Page on the Website has a Title
If one or more of the pages in your website do not have a page title, then you are potentially missing out on good search engine rankings. There are many ways in which you can audit your website to identify these pages using tools such as Xenu to crawl the website but this takes someone to do this. An alternative is to let Google Analytics or Urchin do the heavy lifting for you.
Both Google Analytics and Urchin will only record the page's title when there is one available in the document. To locate the pages with missing titles requires a little work but the rewards are great.
The first step is to modify the Google Analytics tracking code a little.
Add the following code to the bottom of the pages on your website or better still use our GAUtils script to track this automatically.
<script type="text/javascript">
if(! document.title || document.title=="")
{
_pURL = _pErrD+'titles/missing.html?url='+ escape(document.location.href);
if(self.urchinTracker)
urchinTracker(_pURL);
if(self._gat && self.pageTracker)
pageTracker._trackPageview(_pURL);
}
</script>
This script looks at the document's title and then sends a request to Google Analytics if there isn't a title tag at all or if the tag is missing altogether.
Once in place you can then view this report in Google Analytics by going to the Content -> Content Drilldown report and then looking for the directory "Errors" click on the link and then locate the directory titles. Alternatively you can just search for the pattern "errors/titles" in the Top Content Report.
You can also see this in Urchin as well under the Content Optimization -> Content Performance -> Content Drilldown report.
As Google Analytics has the ability to send these reports to your email address, it is recommended that you use this feature to send the report to the relevant person on a weekly or monthly basis.
- Using Google Analytics for SEO
- Finding Missing Page Titles
- How to find keywords in your page titles
Web Analytics Association