Thursday, November 12, 2009

Improve That Title Tag And Draw More Traffic

By Dirk Andersen

For search engine optimization, think hard about the most important sentence on your page: its title tag. Written well, this phrase can have the most power to get your site well-situated in search results for your site's key themes.

Most important is to have your three to four key words or phrases appear in your title tag. The ones you most wish to highlight should be among the first used, but you can also reuse them in your sentence for additional emphasis. For a site selling low-cost site design, I would try a phrase like this example:

Exclude branding and sales pitch from your title tag, even though you may want your own company's name front and center. Unless you have a brand name to match Coca Cola, people are unlikely to be looking for your site and you're better off with the most important keywords up front, leaving other spaces on your site to establish your brand name. If your company's title has keywords in it, those are an exception--as in the case of the our hypothetical Acme Web Design Company, but they may not be the most important words to begin with. At the same time, you should keep your sales pitch to a minimum in your title tag, and stick with the simple terms used to find your product.

In your title tag, include words that highlight your niche or geographical region. To achieve a place in the top ten or twenty results for "web design," is a gargantuan task, but if Acme Web Design Company is situated in Columbus, Ohio, you could achieve much better results locally. You may find better results come from sticking your geographical niche in that title tag, producing something that looks like "Web Design Columbus Ohio Low Cost Web Design in Columbus Ohio with the Acme Web Design Company"

A long title tag can be a better choice. Some say 70 character is the max length for your title tag but while, only those first 70 show up in a browser's header, search engine robots read all of them. Those robots won't penalize you for exceeding 70 characters and you'll see site in competitive areas taking advantage of those long titles. Write what meets your needs. "You need to get the most important words and phrases in there to explain what products or services you offer.

Even in a very long title tag, you can't fit all the search words someone might want to use to find your site. You can alternate title tags within your site to work around this problem. Instead of labeling your services page "services" our web design site could go with "low cost, web design services". "Contact" could be replaced with a header re-emphasizing our company's geographical location, et cetera. A lot of sites do make this error and use identical title tags on each of the inner pages of a website. Don't make this mistake this yourself. Use each page's title to make one more plug for your key words and phrases.

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