The Simplest And Most Powerful SEO Technique
A lot of sites we run across just need a little SEO kick to get listed in the search engines. For some reason these sites just can’t be found anywhere on Google, Yahoo or MSN. We always here from the client, “We should be ranking somewhere for this term!”. After about 30 seconds of investigating, we usually spot the problem.
The problem has to do with the title tags across the site. They usually suffer from one or two common problems:
1. The same title tag is repeated across most of the pages throughout the site.
2. There is little descriptive information in the title tags.
Duplicate Title Tags
First of all let’s explain what a title tag is. If you look at the top of your web browser right now you will see the words “The Simplest And Most Powerful SEO Technique”. This is the content inside the title tag. If you look through most of the pages on this site, you will notice that content will be unique for each web page on the site. This is exactly what you want to do for each page on your site. Having the same content in your title tags is frowned up by the search engines.
Add Some Words To That Tag!
On a lot of sites you will find one word title tags like “About”, “Contact”, and “Products”. Having one word title tags is as bad as spending $10,000 to have a site developed and then never releasing it to the public. A total waste!
Oh, and let’s make something very clear (this isn’t always obvious to some people): Search engines display your title tag on their results pages.
From a purely marketing perspective, sites that have one word title tags have miserably failed because they are not capitalizing on that free 80 or so character listing given to them by the search engine. Not to mention the additional improved search engine rankings they would get by having relevant, descriptive title tags.
The best practice when creating title tags is to make a spreadsheet that identifies all the pages on your site and describe what each page is about. Next, try to add relevant keywords to these titles if those magical keywords are missing from any of them. Finally, keep the length of the title tag to one sentence.
The reason why we called this post “The Simplest And Most Powerful SEO Technique” is because focusing on your title tags will make the most dramatic impact in terms of bringing in more targeted visitors. A lot of people will say it’s all about links, but all the links in the world won’t communicate what your site is about on the search engine results pages.
All the links in the world won’t communicate what your site is about on the search engine results pages.
Agreed that the title tag carries a lot of weight in the SERPS pages when it comes to on-page work, organised keyword heading tags which marry up to the title tag and optimised content can prove more effective than just amending the page title.
🙂 Yeah I was planning on getting to a post about headings and how they work well together with title tags. Just too damn busy!
Right. All in one Seo wordpress plugin is doing exactly that with Titles
I just recently learned that page titles need to be different for all pages, just as page descriptions and keywords for that particular page. Once I did this for a couple inexpensive template sites, guess what? They are getting 1st. page ranking for many keywords in my niche, and beating up my Flagship site I think linked above. Great Stuff, again!