Beginners SEO – Quality Page Titles Rule

August 28, 2009

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 page 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. It is part of your navigation menu. 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 real estate selling. 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 around 65 characters and spaces. Your title can go longer but that portion will not appear in the results. The words decrease in importance as the title gets longer. So the pages most important keywords should appear first.

When search engines deliver their search results they include three pieces of information. The first piece of information is the page title. Roughly about 45% of searchers use this title 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.

I struggle with this sites Home pages title. I have changed it many times and then observed the results. It currently reads Local Phoenix SEO Tucson Search Engine Optimization Services Solutions. I just did a bit of what I call Shampoo SEO where I re-asses the effectiveness of my SEO efforts. Yes, the SEO guy challenges himself to be better. You should review yours every 30 days. I had been targeting the Phoenix Market with my blog. While it was often on the first page of Google it wasn’t getting many click trough’s. The site is now back onto the first page for Phoenix SEO but the url reads .com and not .com/blog. Only time will tell if the url change will make a difference in how many visitors this keyword phrase will produce.

If you want to be successful at internet marketing you need to be always testing and improving your blog or website.

You also need to keep in mind that your page title does not need to read like a sentence. It is wise to avoid any throw 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 Services Solutions.

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 in the page title, on the web page, and in your page description tag  your chances of appearing in the search results increase dramatically.

The above example includes many combination’s that we might have a reasonable chance of appearing in the search results for. This is partially 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 200 million results in Google and search engine optimization produces 76 million results. The last time I checked we ranked 461 for SEO.

The keywords beginners SEO produces a mere 1.7 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. This process is called using the long tail, but that’s a story for another day. Oh, yes, whatever you do, don’t use the same page title more than once!

Are you ready to create effective page titles?

We at Tucson SEO Solutions are officially requesting that you join the conversation here. That is, if you found that this post was at all interesting, useful, or perhaps you are just looking for a useful link. Then, I would like to entice you to comment by providing you with useful backlinks as part of what I call “Scratch My Back Marketing.”

We are now using the Scratch My Back Marketing plugin. This anti spam plugin simply requires that your comment be at least 150 characters in length or it is automatically rejected. It’s that simple. We are now forcing commenters to do what we were requesting for months on this blog! The blog also uses Keyword and Comment Luv. Please note that if you only include keyword your comment may be used put you will not obtain a link!

The Scratch My Back Marketing requires you to scratch this blog by leaving a useful comment. We then will provide you with an anchor text Do Follow Link. It’s all about win/win marketing. I am willing to exchange page rank for the bump that a fresh comment provides.

Are you ready to exchange comments for links?

This is the part where I move link juice around the site and hope that someone might actually want to learn more about our local small business solutions and venture further.

Too learn more about our services please check out these links:

Local SEO Services Tucson Website Designs Tucson Search Engine Optimization Phoenix SEO

Holistic SEO Solutions Geo-Targeted SEO Solutions Niche SEO Solutions Arizona SEO Solutions

Ethical Link Building Training Affordable Website Designing Tucson

If your business is located in the US, Tempe, Phoenix, Glendale, and Scottsdale, Arizona or beyond and you would like to learn more about how your website can benefit from a blog, SEO, Niche SEO, Internet marketing, or our affordable website design/re-design services please call Tucson SEO at 520-777-6479 or 1-866-512-1230 Now!

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