When Google displays your page in the search engines, this display consists of the following items:
Your topic: Your page title i.e. a short text about the content of your page.
www.die webadresse.de/and-the-alias-name-of-your-page/
01.07.2020 - A short description of your page, the so-called Description,
which is always spread over two lines and cut off if the text is too long w.......
We have already talked about the page title elsewhere. In the example above, the term "Your Topic" is the page title of the home page, which is always displayed together with the page title of your page.
We will explain how to create the right link (alias) for your page in a moment.
After the date comes the description of your page. Since the space is very limited, you should be brief, use an important keyword and describe in a few words what the visitor of your page can expect. A long text is of no use at all, because Google cuts off everything above a certain length, as shown. So get straight to the point. You should not use more than 160 characters.
If you do not create your own description for a page, Google will use the description of the home page or the global information. Google will do the same if the page title is missing. Your site lives from visitors. It would be a pity if your visitors don't come at all because they are disappointed by the search result on Google.
Aliases
Now let's explain how to create an alias, why you should do it and what happens if there is no alias.
Very important: An alias name is ALWAYS unique. You cannot give two pages the same alias name. If a page already has an alias name and you assign this name to another page and save this, the already existing alias name of the other page will be deleted and replaced by the ID number again. Therefore, when linking an internal page, it is not necessary to specify in which level the page is located. It is completely sufficient to use /alias-name.html, no matter where the page is located. Therefore, it is also possible to move pages at any time without having to change links to them.
As mentioned above, the name of a page is not necessarily suitable as a direct link. On the one hand, it often contains spaces between words and special characters, and on the other hand, it can happen that the page name is changed and modified in the course of optimization. If now the page name would be automatically the link of your page, then all links with the old page name would become invalid as soon as you make a change of the name.
Therefore, the correct link of your page is independent of the name that appears in the navigation.
When you create a new page or copy an existing page using page4's page manager, the new page is assigned a unique ID number that identifies that page. This number cannot be changed and is always active. If you don't use an alias, then your pages will be displayed in the browser with this ID number. It looks like this:
"www.namedeinerwebseite.de/1234.html" or "www.namedeinerwebseite.de/1234.html" if you are still using our old system.
Such "numbered" pages are neither helpful for a search engine nor for a visitor or a searcher at Google. It is absolutely not to recognize, which content is on the page 1234.html.
Where to enter the alias name?
When editing a page in the page manager, there is a field directly under the page title and the name of the page. There you can enter the alias name with which your page should be displayed in the browser and which will also be displayed by Google in the search results. Such a name may only consist of lowercase letters, numbers and a hyphen. All other characters are not allowed and will be automatically removed or converted. The extension ".html" is added automatically and is not part of the name. The alias name of a page should clearly describe the subject of the page. If you need several words for it, you should make hyphens between the words. The following example shows why:
Alias without hyphens = dasbestefutterfuerdeinefische.html
Alias with hyphens = the-best-food-for-your-fish.html
In our opinion, the sense can be seen much better if the words are separated by a hyphen, which virtually replace the spaces between the words.
In the simplest case, the alias name corresponds to the name of the page displayed in the navigation. If you need or want to keep this name short for design reasons, the alias name can of course be longer. However, make sure that the entire link is displayed in Google's search results and is not so long that Google has to hide the last part.
It's best to set the alias name when you create the page, if you already know what content the page will have. This costs you relatively little time and improves your presentation on Google enormously and makes it easier for your visitors to find their way around. Also, links on external pages that immediately show what to expect when you click on the link are better and lower the threshold to click on that link quite a bit. On Twitter, links may be shortened because there is limited space and users have gotten used to that. But with links on normal pages, it's easy to get the impression that you're trying to hide something if the link doesn't tell you what to expect.