How to write compelling page titles

From an SEO perspective, the title of the webpage is very important. These are the words that describe what your page is about and are the first words that a search engine sees when it crawls your webpage looking for content to add to its index.

The page title is also what the searcher sees in a search result – so the page title is very important in describing what the page is about and if the title meets the searcher’s criteria, then it is more likely to be clicked on and your page opened.

It is safe to assume that the majority of searchers these days will be tempted to either click or ignore based on the content of the title. This is like your ad in the natural search section of the search engine results page.

Now that the impact of the title of the webpage is obvious, let me explain how to write an effective and powerful title.

First the basics! The webpage title aka the title tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page. So, as no two pages on your website are the same, hence why should their title tags be? Therefore, as a general rule, title tags for each page on your website should be unique. This is an added bonus from an SEO perspective, because now you can target many more keywords and spread your reach across search engine indexes.

The second thing to consider is whether you want to add your company name in the title tag? The answer is that it depends on your branding strategy. If your company name is a known brand, or if you want to promote your firm name as a brand or if your company name consists of keyword(s) that you want to target such as ABC Family Solicitors targeting the keyword “Family Solicitors”, then by all means add your company name in the title tag. If not, then use the limited but valuable space to add your targeted keywords. If you do decide to add your company name, make sure that it is at the end of the title. This is because you want search engines and your visitors to first read
the targeted keyword(s) for that page and then the company name.

It is important to remember that since the title tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page, you need to make sure that the title tag is relevant. For example, the title tag for an about us page is “About Website Design Company – ECommerce Partners”. Hence, the title tag does its job of informing what the page is about. Now, you might have noticed that instead of “About Us – ECommerce Partners”, we added “About Website Design Company – ECommerce Partners”.

The reason is because “Website Design Company” is one of the key phrases we want to target and so, we replaced “About Us” with “About Website Design Company”. This brings out an important point. We need to do a keyword analysis before we write an effective and powerful title tag.

Keyword mining and analysis is a very important part of writing compelling page titles and is a part of the Search Engine Optimization service that First One On provides to their clients.

The next step after keyword analysis will be to write down title tags for each and every web page on your website.

Please be careful when writing title tags and never, never over stuff keywords in the title. Doing so will undermine the power of the title tag and defeat the purpose of better ranking in the search engines. The title tag is the title of your web page and so it must be relevant and meaningful. Remember, this is the title in your AD in the natural search listings of the search engine.

General Suggestion: You cannot promote all of your keywords in one page. Normally, you should promote 3 to 5 keyword phrases per page. The ‘Title tag’ should contain up to 3 important keywords that match to the body of the page content. If the keyword you are trying to promote is highly competitive, you can consider repeating the important keyword twice in the first 100 words of the page content.

Limit the length of the title keywords to 65 characters or less, including spaces. There’s no reason to have the engines cut off the last word and have it replaced with a “…” Note that some search engines are now accepting longer titles and Google, in particular, is now supporting up to 70 characters.

Use a divider when splitting up the keywords. We generally recommend the use of the “|” symbol aka the pipe bar. Others choose the arrow “>” or hyphen “-” and both work well.

Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 heading tag can be valuable from both a SEO keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement. Users who go to the page from the search result listing will have the expectation of finding the title they clicked on. Users will be more likely to stay on a page they’re reasonably certain fits their intended search query.

Meta Title Tags are Gold

Google has a free e-book out; “Improving Online Conversions for Dummies.” Just downloaded it yesterday.

If Google speaks, I want to listen.

You can download the e-book here.

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“When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. — “Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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After Google started using website speed as a parameter in their ranking algorithms every webmaster has a good reason to keep an eye on the page load speed of their website. Google’s bending over backwards to spread the word about this new speed penalty is proof in itself since big G is usually very secretive about pending algorithm changes.

From the announcement we learn that the speed penalty was introduced following experiments by Google that revealed the impact website speed has on Internet users.

But the results of the experiment come as no surprise even for someone that has started to use the Internet recently; users prefer websites that load faster and tend to spend more time on such websites.

However, the search engine giant has been careful to state that even though website speed is now a factor, it is not the primary parameter for determining results. The quality and relevance of information is still the determining factor, but if your website speed is slow, you will receive a Google penalty.

This implies that it is important for you as a webmaster to assess the speed of your website to determine whether you are moving further down the search engine results pages (SERPs) because your website is slower than your direct competitors.

How Can Google Know Your Page Speed?

It is vital that you understand the basics of how Google’s algorithm determines your website speed and thus your SERP ranking. The search engine uses two main factors when it comes to speed assessment.

First, your website will receive a higher speed ranking if it responds faster to Googlebot, the crawler program Google uses to find and index websites.

Second, your website will also receive a good speed ranking if it records a faster loading time on Google Toolbar than your competition. To better assist you in analyzing your website speed, Google has added a page speed report to their webmaster tools found within the Google webmasters ‘lab’ section.

The tool and the reports can be used to compare your website’s page load times to that of other websites. Once you are armed with the information of where your page ranks in the speed hierarchy, you can start to make the necessary code and structure changes to make it respond faster.

Your first priority should be to make sure you have no SLOW pages on your site. Pages that take two seconds or more to load and pages that are marked as SLOW in Google Webmaster Tools need to be improved to avoid a Google penalty for website speed.

When you have no slow pages left, try to make all your pages load in less than a second. Read on to see why this is important.

Having a website that loads quickly has more benefits than just higher search engine ranking and avoiding a Google penalty.

A website optimized for speed reduces the bandwidth required on your hosting service, thus reducing your overall hosting costs.

Faster websites also provide a better browsing experience because users are able to get information faster and navigate through your website more easily.

In addition, websites optimized for speed work better when accessed on mobile phones, PDAs and other devices that do not have the same level of processing memory as your standard laptop or desktop computer.

Even though you can have a mobile variant of your website which is trimmed down, some users will want to view your site in full HTML on their phone or PDA and a faster loading website will have a better chance of successfully loading on such devices.

As a webmaster, there are a number of free tools that you can use to improve the loading speed of your website. I have listed three of the more popular ones below:

Page Speed

Page Speed is an open-source add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser. It evaluates the speed of your website and gives you suggestions on how to improve your website speed.

Page Speed runs tests on the architectural configuration of both your web server and your website’s front end code. After running these tests, it gives you a report on your website speed and suggestions on how to improve the speed of your website.

Yslow

Yslow is a free Firefox add-on from Yahoo integrated with Firebug software for website development. It displays statistics, an evaluation report and also provides suggestions on how best to improve the speed of your website using best practices.

Yslow comes integrated with other tools for performance evaluation, including Smush. Use it and JSLint to further enhance your website performance. Yslow is a Yahoo product but is still useful for avoiding the Google speed penalty.

SSEL Speed Tools

There is also a website speed check at Secret Search Engine Labs where you can get a quick answer on how big your webpage is and how fast it loads.

The Website Speed Quick Fix

There are several factors that affect page load speeds on your website, many of them technical and best solved by your webmaster or developer, but some changes you can do yourself as long as you have some experience with HTML and creating web pages.

Reduce the number, size and quality of images and use less audio, flash and Javascript. Reduce the length of the page by splitting a long page into several short pages. Strip the source code of redundant HTML, Javascript and CSS code that just slows things down. Don’t use images and other components that are linked live from other domains; instead use a copy on your own server.

And don’t forget to keep your eyes on Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site performs compared to the competition.

Website Speed Penalty – Google is Testing Your Load Time!

Summer is over. It is time to get back to work in a serious way.

Cheryl’s 1st day back is today. We have had 2 months together as she recovered from her bicycle accident. Today she starts 2 weeks of part time work and then full time after that.

It is time for me to be after the business of building my business as well.

It sure was an interesting couple of months. I would not trade it for all the world.

However, summer is over and it is time to get back to work. This is going to be one very busy week!

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Flaming is something that every blogger will see from time to time. Basically flaming is when someone viciously attacks you or someone else that posts something on your blog. Typically a flaming is very personal and quite vicious.

It is important that you handle flaming, in fact you probably want to have a written policy about inappropriate behavior on your blog including flaming.

How to Handle a Flaming on Your Blog

First and foremost you want to make sure you address any flaming or other personal attacks that appear on your blog. This is especially true if someone is attacking another reader of your blog. Your failure to handle these types of postings will make it appear as if you condone them. You want your readers to know that you value them and will make sure they are not attacked for participating on your blog.

The first thing you should do is delete the flaming post. Once it is deleted you should contact the person who was flamed and apologize for the behavior or the person who flamed them and let them know the offensive posting was removed.

After contacting the person who was flamed you need to contact the person who posted the inflammatory posting. You should let them know the offensive posting was removed and that you do not tolerate that type of behavior on your blog.

If their post was extremely offensive you can immediately ban them from your blog. The alternative is to warn them that if they post anything in the future that violates your blog policies they will be banned.

How to Handle You Being Flamed

If the personal attacks are directed at you, it is important to take action. Just as you would protect any member of your blog you need to protect yourself as well. Though you should always invite feedback and commentary, including negative commentary, you should not accept flaming.

Remove any inappropriate comments and provide a warning to the person or persons who posted it. You can even invite them to post an edited version of their comments if appropriate. Most will probably not take you up on the offer but some may.

If you protect yourself and your readers from flaming you will be promoting a healthy environment where topics can be discussed and heated debates can ensue without rising to the level of inappropriate flaming on your valued blog.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

A Flaming on Your Blog

The examined life is no picnic. — Unknown

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Life is like riding a bicycle. You don’t fall off unless you plan to stop peddling.– Claude Pepper

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A man who acquires knowledge and does not use it is like a farmer who plows his field but does not sow it. — Unknown

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important. — Jim Rohn

“The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.” — Napoleon Hill, author

Envy provides the mud that failure throws at success. — Unknown

“First we make our habits then our habits make us.” — Denis Waitley

“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.” — Lyndon B. Johnson

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