SEO Basics-What You Must Know About Title Tags!

Most of my clients and readers are brick and mortar business owners or home based entrepreneurs and are NOT SEO gurus.

So for this reason I thought I would publish a series of basic SEO lessons ANY business owner can use to greatly improve the visibility of their website in the search engines.

Remember, the #1 priority marketing your business online is getting your website found by your prospects!

What good is your website if your customers can’t find you, right?

So over the next few lessons I’ll share with you some tips to improve your “on page” SEO factors of your website.

“On Page” SEO factors are simply the things you see on your website like your title tags, meta descriptions and your web copy or content, OK?

So in your first lesson you and I will cover “Title Tags”.

Your title tag tells your prospects and the search engines what your web page is all about. It’s really a summary of the web page content all summed up into a few words.

You can easily find the title tag for a website by checking the top left corner of your preferred web browser as such:

Then of course the search engines results pages display your title tags as hyperlinks as such:

The Title Tag is used by the search engines and when done correctly should be a summary of the content on your web page.

As you can see above the title tag for my website is “Philadelphia Online Marketing and Philadelphia SEO.” This tells the search engines my website is about Online Marketing and SEO Services in the Philadelphia area.

Now I do handle online marketing and SEO services all over the country and in Europe but part of my business comes from local businesses in the 5 county area around Philadelphia.

What I’ve done is built web pages around my national online marketing and SEO business. Of course I use unique Title Tags for each of those pages as well but for the sake of explanation I’m only using this example.

Now you can make the title as long as you want but the search engines will shorten it so it displays properly on the search engine results pages.

For title tags to show properly and in full on all the top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, the Title Tag needs to be NO more than 65 characters or less in length. This equates to about 8 or 9 words on average.

I recommend using your main keywords in your title tag and in my experience, your main keyword or keyword phrase should be listed first as in the photo above.

You’ll also want to write unique title tags for each of your web pages. Using the same title tag over and over for each web page is bad practice and could be considered duplicate content by the search engines.

One last thing about your title tags, I would not recommend just stuffing your title tags with keywords. Try to make your title tag compelling, as this is what your customer will see in the search engine results page.

If you website is sandwiched amongst 9 other websites you’ll want to make sure you title stands out as long as you can include your main keywords, make sense?

In fact, I need to work on the title tag of my home page but because my keywords are so long it’s a little difficult to add additional words to make it more compelling but I am constantly tweaking and testing my title tags as you should be.

So one last tip on the use of your title tags, it’s a good practice to use your title tags as the title of your web page or something very similar.

You can see an example of this strategy below:

Notice The Title Tag ” Multiple Streams Of Income-Recession Proof Your Business”

Now notice the title of of my web page:

 

As you can see the title tag and page title are very similar and this lets your prospect or customer know they are at the right page for the information they are searching for especially if they found your website via the search engines.

This helps improve your visitors “user experience” because they are expecting to get the content they clicked on. If you title tag says one thing and your web page gives something else your prospect will click off your web page and you’ll probably lose the lead for ever.

So I hope you enjoyed today’s lesson and tomorrow I’ll talk to you more about how to leverage additional “on page” SEO factors so your website dominates the search engines!

Now get busy, Bill Parlaman

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