Skip to content
KoishiAI
ไทย
← Contents

Chapter 3 of 5 · SEO for Thai Websites — Getting Google to Find, Understand and Choose Your Pages

On-page SEO for Thai: titles, descriptions, URLs, headings and images

Write titles and descriptions with the words Thai searchers really type, why Google rewrites titles, how Thai URLs should be encoded, and what not to spend time on — word counts and heading order.

Once Google can crawl and keep a page, the next questions are whether it understands which searches the page answers, and whether people who see it in results want to click. This chapter is about what sits on the page itself.

3.1 Start from the words people type

Thai has a problem English meets less often: the same thing can be written several ways, and different groups type different ones.

TopicWhat people may type
Artificial intelligenceAI, เอไอ, ปัญญาประดิษฐ์
Mobile phoneมือถือ, สมาร์ทโฟน, โทรศัพท์
Restaurantร้านข้าว, ร้านอาหาร, a dish name + neighbourhood

How to find out which words people use:

  • the Queries tab of the Performance report in Search Console shows which searches already bring people;
  • type in Google’s search box and look at the suggestions;
  • ask real customers what they call your product.

Titles and descriptions should use the words people type, not the words the site owner likes.

A lesson from KoishiAI: a category name is not a search term

Our homepage description once said, in effect, “news and articles about AI”. It named the category correctly but contained none of the words Thai readers actually search for, such as “AI news in Thailand” or “international AI news”. We rewrote the description and title to include them, still reading as a normal sentence rather than a list of keywords.

3.2 Titles (<title>)

The title is the first thing people see in results. Google recommends:

  • every page has its own <title>, different from every other page;
  • it describes that page, concisely;
  • no repeating the same words — keyword stuffing is against the spam policies;
  • the brand at the start or the end, separated by a delimiter such as — or |.

Length: Google says there is no limit on <title> length; the title link is truncated to fit the device width. The “60 characters” figure quoted everywhere is not in Google’s documentation. In Thai, counting is harder still, because vowel marks above and below the line and tone marks take no width. Put the important words first, so a cut-off ending still reads.

Thisbeats this
ข้าวมันไก่ประตูน้ำ สาขาสุขุมวิท — ร้านเจ๊นิดหน้าแรก (“Home”)
Convert Thai B.E. to C.E. and back — KoishiAIKoishiAI — Tools — Year converter
Choosing a laptop for video editing on a student budgetlaptop, editing laptop, cheap laptop, student laptop

Why Google changes your title

Results sometimes show a title that is not your <title>. Google says it may use the main visible title on the page, <h1>, og:title, prominent text, the text of links pointing to the page, or WebSite structured data.

If it happens often, check whether <title> and <h1> disagree, whether titles are long or repeated across pages, or whether every page carries the same boilerplate.

3.3 Meta descriptions

Google writes that the text under the title in results — the snippet — comes mainly from the page content, and that the meta description is used when it describes the page better. Its job is to help people who see the result decide to click.

  • Write one per page; do not reuse one text across the site.
  • Say what people want to know before clicking: price, opening hours, what the article gives them.
  • Sites with many database-driven pages can generate descriptions programmatically from each page’s real data.

Length works like titles: no limit, truncated to fit the device.

To keep part of a page out of snippets, add data-nosnippet to it. Google supports the attribute only on div, span and section elements, so wrap the text in one of those.

3.4 Thai URLs

Google recommends words in the audience’s language in URLs, with non-ASCII characters percent-encoded. The word ข่าว (“news”) in a URL, for instance, becomes %E0%B8%82%E0%B9%88%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A7. CMSs and browsers usually do the encoding for you.

Thai or English URLs is a usability question more than a ranking one, since Google says words in the path have hardly any effect on ranking.

Thai URLsEnglish or transliterated URLs
Thai readers understand them at onceShort when copied and pasted
When copied, they may turn into a very long %E0%B8… stringYou must pick one spelling and keep it site-wide

Either works if you stay consistent. Separate words with - rather than _, as Google recommends, and never change a URL in use without a redirect.

3.5 Headings, length and structure

Two things not to worry about, per Google’s guide:

  • length — there is no minimum or maximum word count; a short article that fully answers the question beats a long one that circles;
  • heading order and number — they do not matter to Google Search.

Headings still matter to readers, most of whom scan them before deciding to read. Make each heading say what is under it, as this chapter’s numbered headings do.

3.6 Images

  • Put images in <img src="…"> (or inside <picture>). Google does not index CSS background images.
  • Write alt text that describes the image in the page’s context — “poached chicken rice with fermented soybean sauce” beats “food photo” — and do not stuff keywords into it.
  • Give files short, meaningful names: khao-man-gai-sukhumvit.jpg beats IMG00023.JPG.
  • Formats Google supports: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG and AVIF.

3.7 After this chapter

  • Open Search Console’s Queries tab and write down the words people really use to find you.
  • Pick 5 important pages and rewrite their titles and descriptions with those words, the important ones first.
  • Check that no two pages share a <title>.
  • Check the alt text of your key images.

The next chapter covers telling Google, and sharing apps such as Facebook and LINE, what a page is — through structured data and Open Graph tags.

Sources