SEO Title Tags - SEO tips for a Sunday Afternoon

I've had several friends request advice from me on optimizing their websites for search engine visibility, and so I thought it was probably about time to start a series of posts on my blog about SEO. My goal is to provide some clear and quick tips that can get someone started on the right foot when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). The first thing that comes to my mind is title tag optimization.

Make Title Tags descriptive and unique, but uniform!

For those of you who are new to the web design world, the "title" of a webpage is what shows up in the title bar of your web browser. Usually it is blue, since most people probably have Windows running on their computer, and the default color is blue. So, look in the blue bar at the top of the browser, and you will see the title of the page.

Planning for proper title tags - the step before the step. In order to have good title tags, you've got to have pages, and in order to have good pages, you've go to have good, well organized content. Don't place all your content on one page. If you do this, viewers will find it hard to sift through the content in order to figure out what they want to know about you. Here are some easy things to do that will help you figure out how to structure your site:

1. Think about your business and how you might organize your information.
   
2. Then look at some websites of similar businesses. Go to Google.com and type in your product or industry. How are those websites organized? Are there conventions that your customers might expect when they visit a site in your industry?
3. Organize your content.
   
• Create different "buckets". You'll probably have the "homepage bucket", then the "products bucket", then the "about our company bucket", then the "contact us bucket", then (if you're big enough) a bucket with information about applying for jobs at your firm, and so on.
  
• Under the products bucket, you may have subcategories of products. Think about these things, then divide up your content and place it on corresponding pages.
  
4. Chose titles for the content on each page. Do not make all titles the same. For example, don't just use the company name as every page's title. Chose titles that describe what the page is about.
   

The most common mistake - no variation. Most small businesses probably don't pay too much attention to the title tag, other than making sure it has the company name in it somewhere. The most common thing I've seen is to have all pages in the site have the same title tag. This is a mistake. You want the titles of your pages to be different.

But some uniformity is encouraged! If your company's name were ACME Inc., you would be alright to include ACME somewhere in your title tag on every page. The best way to do this is to add the company name at the end of your title tags.

• The page that has most of the general information about your company would be titled, "About our company - ACME Inc."
• Similarly, if you were a photographer, you could have a page entitled, "Jon & Trish's Wedding - Acme Photography, Inc."

The basic principle: Unique parts of the title should come first, followed by uniform parts. This basically means that, since all titles are to be unique, place the unique parts at the beginning, followed by the category name or company name. If you're a newspaper, you would place article titles in the front of the page title, followed by the name of the newspaper. For example:

• Diplomat's speech stalled by talking donkey - The Bethlehem Chronicle

Also give the reader an idea of where they are in your site. If you have a site with lots of content and subcategories, it is a good idea to include the names of categories in the titles of the site. If you chose to do that, the above example could look like this:

• Diplomat's speech stalled by talking donkey - Local news - Bethlehem Chronicle.
  

This simple example follows the format of [Unique article title] - [Section] - [Website title]. You can easily tailor this to your site.

The moral of the story - capturing a potential customer's specific web search. If you're wondering why these suggestions have been made this way, think about things this way:

• Each search engine user out there is a potential customer of yours.
  
• When a search engine looks for results, title tags are one of the most important factors in determining the relevance of a webpage.
• If your page is relevant to the user's search, the first way you're going to tell the search engine that is by placing specific information about your page in your title tag.
  

Your company name might be important to you, but if your customer is looking for camera parts, they'll be more quickly drawn to a page that has the word "Canon" or "SLR" in the page title. If you've ever done online research about anything, just think about your own behavior when you search for something. "Smith Enterprises Inc." is not going to draw many people, if that's all your title tag says.

How to change the page's title with Notepad.

• Open Notepad.
• With notepad, click File, Open, and then find your webpage that you want to open.
• You'll see confusing text that looks like web programming language. Press Ctrl and F at the same time.
• You'll see a Search box. Type "<title>" and press Enter. (type it with the greater than and less than brackets, but without quotes.)
• You'll see something like this:
• <title>Canon Digital SLR Cameras - ACME Inc.</title>
  
• <title> and </title> The stuff between is open for you to change. That's your page's title.
  
• Change the text, save the document, then close it.
  
• You have now changed the page's title. Open it in a web browser to see the new page.

I hope that was easy enough to follow. This is the first entry in a weekly series about small business SEO. Come back next Sunday for the next article.

Special Y! Ads Still Showing Up

I was just watching the morning news programs and happened to see an ad for Special K (the cereal), which at the end tells the viewer to go to Yahoo! and search for [special k] for more information. So, naturally my first impulse was to get back to the blogosphere and post.

Here are some comments from other bloggers about the ad campaign, which I'm dubbing "Special Y!".

Special K - special idea - Residual Media
Is Yahoo Selling Out? - Scott Hendison
Just What Kind of Ads are Running on Yahoo? - CenterNetworks

The biggest concern among these writers seems to be the fact that the ads that appear do not have the expected shaded box around them, so it doesn't follow Yahoo!'s usual method of displaying sponsored results. Therefore, the concern is that users are likely to not realize the ad is an ad.

However, my main interest would be to see if there is any research out there that shows the success (or failure) of the TV ad campaign in getting people to the web. It's interesting - usually, TV ad campaigns have 1 goal - get people to buy the product. With this one, we still have that goal as the primary one, but we also have another one in the effort to get Special K's people to Yahoo!'s website.

I would really like to see some research showing traffic increases or decreases after the placement of this tv ad. Do traditional media advertisements have the ability to get people to use new media, search, social media, etc?

Bricks and Clicks - Fewer of one means fewer of the other

Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised at the announcement that AOL will be laying off 2,000 of its current employees. Here's the blurb over at SELand:

SELand: AOL To Let Go 2,000 Employees

Target Accessibility Case Could Be A Gain For Usability

I just read an interesting article at the SEWatch blog:

SearchEngineWatch: Don't Ignore Accessibility

The article is specifically about the class-action lawsuit that has been brought against Target stores by the National Federation for the Blind. Apparently, Target's website is not fully accessible to blind users, and so Target is getting sued because this oversight violates California laws protecting people with disabilities.

Most webmasters out there know that there are things you can do to make your website accessible to blind users. Proper CSS formatting, along with proper separation of content from design in each page is all part of the process. However, doing these things will not only allow your site to be accessible to blind users, but will also allow you to make many Web 2.0-type features available on your site easily.

My hope is that better accessibility across the board will also give basic usability a boast. Perhaps we will see some quasi standards evolve for usability aspects of a site - and perhaps we will see the already existing standards become more concrete.

I Beg to Differ! Buying Ads Just Might Be the Ticket To Better Organic Listings

Consider the following post over at SELand:

No, Buying Ads Still Won't Help You With Google's Free Listings

I know, I know. By even suggesting that I disagree with this post, I'm opening myself up to criticism. Let me say that I know, and agree, with the theoretical law of SEM, that Adwords spending will in no way influence one's natural rankings on Google. I know it, you know it, we all know it.

HOWEVER...

What if we look at PPC spending as part of the SEO effort for a webmaster? SEO focuses on increasing your site's visibility. Visibility is affected by several factors, but some major ones include internal accessibility, usability, and overall popularity.

How would you go about increasing your site's overall popularity? Why, you would do whatever you could to get your site's brand name plastered around the internet. You would talk to fellow webmasters about linking to your site, try to get listed on major indexes and directories in your industry, and just get your name out there. Why wouldn't you consider PPC ads as a way to "get your name out there"? Just imagine - someone searches for your product, and there you are, right in front of them, all because you spent a few dollars.

Basically, I'm just contending that anything you can do to increase the number of links to your site out there on the internet - that is a way to increase your site's visibility and influence your site's natural rankings. Increased visibility on a SERP will result in better branding, more link juice, and eventually, better rankings.

Now, we all know about cannibalization, as well as a slew of other issues that this post raises. I know that there are other issues involved, but all I'm saying is that it may be indirect, but PPC ads can eventually influence your natural listings, if they contribute directly to the traffic on your site.



More later.

A Beginner's Guide to Search

This is another useful post form the folks over at SEOmoz:

SEOmoz | Rewriting the Beginner's Guide - Part I: How Search Engines Operate

Above all, I like their frequently appearing cartoon characters - the Google robot and, in this post, the Yahoo! spider.

Yahoo! Search Assist as a Keyword Generator

This article by Rand over at SEOmoz got me to thinking about Search Assist, the new feature from Yahoo!:

SEOmoz | Yahoo! Leveraging "Content" for Queries

Can you tell I have SEOmoz in my feed reader? Anyway...

As a result of the article, I was looking at Yahoo! SERPs, wondering about implications for my company's PPC campaigns, when I realized that Rand's observations also apply to the entire Search Assist feature in Yahoo! SERPs.

Just to quickly provide some background, Yahoo! recently rolled out the new Search Assist feature, which is advertised prominently by a yellow "post-it note" graphic "hanging" down from the search bar on the Yahoo! homepage. On every SERP, you will see keyword suggestions closely related to your search term, displayed in a box that drops down from the search bar. Click any one, and you'll be taken to a new SERP that hopefully will serve your needs better than the one that you got from your initial keyword.

Basically, the article at SEOmoz was commenting on the fact that Yahoo! has started to place links to SERPs directly on their homepage, driving users to SERPs directly related to the content of the day. For example, one of today's blurbs on the Yahoo! homepage is entitled "Cleaning up 'Rat Island'". Below the blurb, there's a link that says, "find out how to get rid of rodents", which will take a user directly to a Yahoo! SERP for the keyword "how to get rid of rodents". Not surprisingly, the top ads that can be viewed here are mostly for pest control companies.

The thing that I noticed from this is how Yahoo!'s Search Assist feature also takes you to SERPs on pre-determined keywords. Rand rightly observes that if you want to beef up traffic on your blog or website, one good idea might be to keep track of what's showing over at the Yahoo! homepage, and bid on those keywords. However, with that in mind, my observation is that the entire Search Assist feature could be used as a kind of keyword generator for your PPC campaign. You should not only keep track of what SERPs Yahoo! links to from its homepage, but you should also keep track of what SERPs are possible from the Search Assist feature. For example, after looking at the blurb about rodents and doing a few clicks on the Search Assist feature, I was able to get the following 15 keywords:

how to get rid of rodents naturally
how to get rid of rodents rats
how to get rid of rodents bait
how to get rid of rodents in your attic
how to get rid of rodents in the attic
how to get rid of rodents home
how to get rid of rodents in attic
sonic mole chaser
mole chasers
solar mole chaser
windmill mole chaser
mole chaser windmill
electronic mole chaser
solar powered mole chaser
p3 mole chaser
p3 international mole chaser

Now, I know that some of these overlap, but most of them have no ads, or at least not very many. What's more, if there are ads, they don't seem to be that helpful. Basically, I'm saying that this is a new list of 15 keywords, and the ad space for all of them should be easy to penetrate. Savvy PPC managers should not only grab Yahoo!'s content-related SERPs, but they should also grab Yahoo!'s Search Assist-generated SERPs - which will probably guarantee a number of highly targeted impressions.

Gimme a Break, Microsoft: You'll Never be Something You're Not (Google)

It looks like MS is now trying to get on the online-documents bandwagon, with their beta launch of the new MS Office Live Workspace. See this article over at SE Land:

SELand: Microsoft Office Live Workspace To Challenge Google Docs

But, really - give me a break, Microsoft. Your online file-sharing is really nothing better than an FTP account if you must have already purchased MS software in order to use the service. This is no competitor to Google's Google Docs software, which plays an entirely different game by allowing users to use software that is completely free of purchase, along with a file storage system that is also free.

Stop pretending, Microsoft - you'll never be as good as Google!

Search Volume is the Best Indicator of Satisfaction

Consider this article over at SEOMoz by Rand Fishkin:

SEOmoz | Yahoo! Is the Most Fulfilling Search Engine?

Rand acknowledges Compete.com's recent findings that say Yahoo! is the most successful major search engine at getting users to click on a result - in other words, Yahoo! SERPs have the highest CTR. However, Rand extrapolates from this that Yahoo! users are the most satisfied users. I don't know if this is the case - just because Yahoo! has a higher CTR on their search results, I don't know if that means Yahoo! users are more satisfied than Google users.

By contrast, I would look at reports such as this one and extrapolate that, since Google's market share is so large, that means Google is so satisfying that it gets everyone's search attempts - even the ones where people don't think they're going to find anything.

Obviously, there are some differences between SERPs on Google and Yahoo. At least, 7 of the top 10 sites will often be the same, though they may not be in the same order. These differences may be what gives Google its edge in market share.

I would like to see some data on searches per user. I know this would be hard to compile, but I think that would take us closer to knowing which SE is actually more satisfying. If a user identifies one SE as more successful, my guess is that the main indicator would be the return visit. And, based on Google's proven ability to steadily keep its market share up, I think the right assumption would be that Google is most satisfactory.