Beginners SEO - Quality Page Titles Rule
August 27, 2008
If you have been around the SEO ballpark a time or two this information is going to be redundant. However, this blog is geared towards the local entrepreneur that requires small business SEO solutions. Before we begin this post, we are assuming that you already have chosen your websites targeted keyword phrases.
After selecting your keyword phrases you will need to know what to do with them. This is where the page title becomes hugely important. First off you need to know that every website should have a page title, most do but some don’t. The page title is similar to a book title and it defines what your web page is all about for the search engines.
Get this wrong and everything else that you do is basically a waste of time and effort. You can locate any websites page title by looking in the uppermost left hand corner of your browser. If your websites url is listed in this area this is a really bad thing. It means that your web page has no title and will never be found in the search results unless you are specifically searching for your domain name.
The second greatest error related to page titles is this. Many websites are created using default settings provided by many website building programs. These default settings often label your pages as Home, About Us, or Contact. These are perfectly good navigation tags to describe your pages to your visitors. However, they are of little use to the search engines. Do a Google search for home and it will produce 7 billion results. Your site has little chance to be found this way. It also does not describe what your web page is about.
The page titles are part of the source code that the search engine reads that do not appear as content on your pages. Essentially each webpage has two titles. One is primarily used for navigating around your website by your visitors. The page title that appears in the source code is used to define your web page for the search engines. Technically, both page titles appear in the source code. It is the web page “title” that we are discussing today.
The page title is the SEO equivalent to location, location, and location used in real estate to describe the most important item in the real estate sale. The same is true for the page title if you want to be positioned high in the search engine rankings. There are a few things that you need to know about creating effective page titles.
You must begin to think of website page titles as book titles. You should also realize that you have two distinctly different audiences that will be reading your titles. They are the search engines and potential customers. You need to also know that Google limits that amount of characters that it presents in its search results to 65 spaces. Your title can go longer but that portion will not appear in the results.
When search engines deliver their search results they include three pieces of information. The first piece of information is the page title and roughly about 45% of searchers use this to decide if they will visit your website. The second or middle piece of information is called the snippet and another 45% of searchers use this information when choosing if they will visit a site. The final 10% will of searchers will use the web pages url as their determining factor. So your page title is your first and best opportunity to make a good impression.
You need to keep in mind that your page title does not need to read like a sentence. It is wise to avoid away words such as how, the, if, and so on. You also should avoid using commas and symbols such as @,$, or /. If you look up at the upper left hand corner of your browser you will see that we have titled this page Beginners SEO Search Engine Optimization Tempe Mesa Chandler.
What we have done here is to tell the search engines this is what this page is about. Now, this is where this all gets very interesting indeed. Any combination of these words may be used by a potential search engine user. If these targeted keyword phrases also appear on the web page, as well, your chances of appearing in the search results increase dramatically.
The above example includes 12 combinations that we might have a reasonable chance of appearing in the search results for. This is based on the number of websites that have these words on their pages. We have no reasonable expectation to place high in the search results for the terms search engine optimization or SEO. SEO alone produces 249 million results in Google and search engine optimization produces 27.6 million results.
The keywords beginners SEO, however produces a mere 1.26 million results. Now, if we wanted to go after this combination of words we would have a reasonably good chance of obtaining first page placement in the Google search results. You will ultimately want to target keyword phrases that do not have a lot of competition, but are words that someone might actually use to find your business.
Are you ready to create effective page titles?
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5 Responses to “Beginners SEO - Quality Page Titles Rule”
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Your blog posts are always so insightful with relevant information.I have been reading your blog for awhile now and have referred you to other small business website owners.also I’ve given you a sphinn.Keep up the super work.
I read your article and then went straight to my website. Now, I know why I have had to spend so much on Pay Per Click to acquire traffic. My page title made on sense. I am firing my web guy today instead of fixing this problem he has had me spending huge amounts on ADWords. Thanks
ADMIN: Glad to be of help. I looked at your problem and I can certainly understand your frustration.
Are you saying I should take the words from my content and use them as my page titles? And that this will increase my chance of being noticed by the search engines. Lets try and see the results.
ADMIN: Absolutely, but what we are suggesting is that your keyword phrases need to appear in the page titles, not just any content. If your page title reads “Home” you will never get any visitors of the search engines for this word and if you did those visitors would be looking for a home not your products or services.
You have made things a little bit easier for me to understand. Sometimes I read these blogs and I just don’t the point that they are making, but you post was easy to understand.
Admin:Tom, Thanks for the comment. We are glad we could help.
Link building is probably the best way to increase your search engine rank (seo) without having to have much experience in internet marketing or web design, and its free too! You need to define your niche and stay within that. For example you would hav…
Admin: This is another example example of what we like to call clever spam. It is where the comment appears to be relevant to the content but that they truncate the last sentence to make it appear as a trackback to fool the spam filters… And it works this site has a PR 3 for a site that doesn’t have any content worth linking too.
They hope that once you land on the site that you will click on the of their Google ads. This spammer visits here every 7 days or so.