Lesson 6: Hot Title Tags for a No 1 Ranking
Previously we have discussed the importance of finding good keyphrases for attracting potential buyers to your site. Having found them the question is what do we do with them.
Many of you will know the importance of building good content around these phrases and this is something we will discuss in detail later. In addition there are other important areas to put them; in fact there are four main places:-
1. In your metadata ( the part of your site that search engine spiders see and human visitors dont)
2. The visible content - keyword rich content as referred to above - visible to both humans and SE spiders
3. Internal links - to different parts of your site
4. External (in-bound) links - in the anchor text of these links - more about this later.
and other places - alt text, footers etc
Many would argue that the TITLE tag (part of the metadata) is the most important in terms of ranking. Here I'm going to give you the optimum structure and content for this tag. That is, one that actually works.
The search engine spiders will scan this when they visit your site to work out what your site is all about.
If your site is about selling 'yellow widgets' you need to include 'yellow widgets' as part of your title tag on your homepage.
More specifically you need to include different title tags on different pages of your site reflecting the different content on that page. For example if you have part of your site devoted to tandoori widgets - this keyphrase needs to appear in the title tag. This practice gives searchers multiple access points into relevant parts of your site. Those searching for yellow widgets would be directed to the homepage; those for tandoori widgets to the page relevant to that content.
So, here's an action point for you:-
Check your title tags by choosing 'file' then 'view source' from your browser toolbar.
(You'll see you title tag at the top, in the HEAD section of your code just before the meta description and keyword tags.)
Do they reflect the content on the pages they appear on?
Anyway here's an optimum structure for your tag. The example here is for a company who are pretty hot in the widgets market (incidentally, the only company I know in the UK that sells edible widgets)
Jones Brothers Bury UK - Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets
(this should be enclosed in the title tag delimeters as you can see in the examples referenced below - eg www.universalarches.co.uk)
Note: The company is Jones Brothers - always good to have your company name up front in the tag and UK put in there (if you're looking for primarily UK based customers).
'yellow widgets' and 'dark crispy widgets' are obviously the two keyphrases we are optimising the page around (ideally it should be one keyphrase per page, but often we can get away with two; three is pushing it)
No more that 10 words, because most search engines dont read beyond this number.
No words repeated more than twice
No identical words next to each other.
Steer clear of non text characters (particularly & which sometimes causes problems with some search engines; hyphens, commas and pipes are OK).
Thats it! Do that on every page and you're moving in the right direction and sometimes ( if everything else has been optimised) this will have an immediate effect.
Here's a personal example; Mrs Klin runs a B&B. Incidentally, in two years Mrs Klin's B&B has gone from 90% of guests coming from the UK to 90% coming from overseas - all to do with the power of the internet and that fact that she sleeps with an on-line marketing consultant (most nights). By changing one word in the title tag ('Kingsley' to 'Frodsham') rankings moved from nowhere to number 2 on Google. This is because the directory she is a member of (doesnt have her own website!- not big enough) had included lots of content on the page about Frodsham. Admittedly its not always as simple as that but it does show what a major contributor the title tag is in the Google algorithm.
When your site gets listed in say, a google hitlist, the first line shown, which is blue, is your title. This is where it gets displayed. So in our example what will be displayed in the google hitlist would be:-
Jones Brothers UK - Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets
Makers of fine edible widgets in a wide variety of flavours and colours...
Hopefully in position one where we will get a 15% click through rate!
The sentence in italics below the title is from the description metatag which we'll adrress next time.
So you see the title is also important because searchers will see this and it will determine whether they click through or not, which of course is the ultimate objective. In the example you will see that I have used capitals to begin each word. Search engine spiders are not case sensitive but the reason I have done this is to make it more searcher friendly and maximise the click through rate.
Here's another example - and a perfect example of how to structure your meta tags - go to google and type in 'profile bending'. You will see that www.universalarches.co.uk comes pretty near the top. Go to the file menu at your browser then select 'view' and 'source'. You will see that the title tag is perfectly structured as detailed above, but also the keyword and description tags are also good models on which to base your own.
Best of luck and please feel free to call me if you wish to discuss or get clarification. (01928 788100). Also you may wish to consider our 'Traffic Builder' service as a cost effective alternative to doing it yourselves.
Many of you will know the importance of building good content around these phrases and this is something we will discuss in detail later. In addition there are other important areas to put them; in fact there are four main places:-
1. In your metadata ( the part of your site that search engine spiders see and human visitors dont)
2. The visible content - keyword rich content as referred to above - visible to both humans and SE spiders
3. Internal links - to different parts of your site
4. External (in-bound) links - in the anchor text of these links - more about this later.
and other places - alt text, footers etc
Many would argue that the TITLE tag (part of the metadata) is the most important in terms of ranking. Here I'm going to give you the optimum structure and content for this tag. That is, one that actually works.
The search engine spiders will scan this when they visit your site to work out what your site is all about.
If your site is about selling 'yellow widgets' you need to include 'yellow widgets' as part of your title tag on your homepage.
More specifically you need to include different title tags on different pages of your site reflecting the different content on that page. For example if you have part of your site devoted to tandoori widgets - this keyphrase needs to appear in the title tag. This practice gives searchers multiple access points into relevant parts of your site. Those searching for yellow widgets would be directed to the homepage; those for tandoori widgets to the page relevant to that content.
So, here's an action point for you:-
Check your title tags by choosing 'file' then 'view source' from your browser toolbar.
(You'll see you title tag at the top, in the HEAD section of your code just before the meta description and keyword tags.)
Do they reflect the content on the pages they appear on?
Anyway here's an optimum structure for your tag. The example here is for a company who are pretty hot in the widgets market (incidentally, the only company I know in the UK that sells edible widgets)
Jones Brothers Bury UK - Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets
(this should be enclosed in the title tag delimeters as you can see in the examples referenced below - eg www.universalarches.co.uk)
Note: The company is Jones Brothers - always good to have your company name up front in the tag and UK put in there (if you're looking for primarily UK based customers).
'yellow widgets' and 'dark crispy widgets' are obviously the two keyphrases we are optimising the page around (ideally it should be one keyphrase per page, but often we can get away with two; three is pushing it)
No more that 10 words, because most search engines dont read beyond this number.
No words repeated more than twice
No identical words next to each other.
Steer clear of non text characters (particularly & which sometimes causes problems with some search engines; hyphens, commas and pipes are OK).
Thats it! Do that on every page and you're moving in the right direction and sometimes ( if everything else has been optimised) this will have an immediate effect.
Here's a personal example; Mrs Klin runs a B&B. Incidentally, in two years Mrs Klin's B&B has gone from 90% of guests coming from the UK to 90% coming from overseas - all to do with the power of the internet and that fact that she sleeps with an on-line marketing consultant (most nights). By changing one word in the title tag ('Kingsley' to 'Frodsham') rankings moved from nowhere to number 2 on Google. This is because the directory she is a member of (doesnt have her own website!- not big enough) had included lots of content on the page about Frodsham. Admittedly its not always as simple as that but it does show what a major contributor the title tag is in the Google algorithm.
When your site gets listed in say, a google hitlist, the first line shown, which is blue, is your title. This is where it gets displayed. So in our example what will be displayed in the google hitlist would be:-
Jones Brothers UK - Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets
Makers of fine edible widgets in a wide variety of flavours and colours...
Hopefully in position one where we will get a 15% click through rate!
The sentence in italics below the title is from the description metatag which we'll adrress next time.
So you see the title is also important because searchers will see this and it will determine whether they click through or not, which of course is the ultimate objective. In the example you will see that I have used capitals to begin each word. Search engine spiders are not case sensitive but the reason I have done this is to make it more searcher friendly and maximise the click through rate.
Here's another example - and a perfect example of how to structure your meta tags - go to google and type in 'profile bending'. You will see that www.universalarches.co.uk comes pretty near the top. Go to the file menu at your browser then select 'view' and 'source'. You will see that the title tag is perfectly structured as detailed above, but also the keyword and description tags are also good models on which to base your own.
Best of luck and please feel free to call me if you wish to discuss or get clarification. (01928 788100). Also you may wish to consider our 'Traffic Builder' service as a cost effective alternative to doing it yourselves.
posted by Unknown at
10:00 pm
