With all the web has to offer these days you have to be willing to take not only the good but the bad. 

You may not realize this but your buying audience is talking online all the time and they hold all the cards. The online surfers of today are sharing what they like and what they don’t like on message boards, blogs, forums and more. At no other time in history has the consumer had as much power as they do now.  The consumer is in control from the first search query to the blurb they left on their blog about how they felt about their experience shopping with you.  WOW!  Think of the implications of that! 

You should know that a person is more likely to go out of their way to let others know about a bad experience they had then they are a good experience. If a customer has a bad experience with a company they are going to talk about it and share it with others. 

Word of mouth was the only way individuals could make their displeasure known before the Internet. Now, with the conception of the world wide web word of mouth magnified by millions. Hundreds of thousands of people now have the opportunity to read a negative comment about your services. And from that, they may make a decision on whether or not to purchase your products or the next guy’s.
With that in mind, we have to think carefully about how we are going to react to negative comments that will certainly be left by unhappy customers.

Now, you could:

 
Ignore the Problem: You could simply not respond at all. However, that’s like taking the ostrich approach and sticking your head in the sand, missing the world because you are too scared to surface and handle confrontation. Not only can this lead to a large loss in business and a damaged reputation but it’s a weak business practice that will most certainly never result in happy repeat customers. And isn’t that what we all want?

Calm Your Angry Customers

The Defense Rests:

Defending your company’s bad business habits or mistakes, whether major or minor, can prove to be a costly mist ake too. Tone is often hard to judge when written and can be taken defensively by the already annoyed customer. The only response you are likely to get is an angry one. Again, this will result in loss of repeat business and a possible bad rep.

The customer is ALWAYS right! We have all heard that before, right. The thing about though is it’s true. The customer is always right and nobody is perfect. So own up to your mistakes and do your best to rectify the situation so you keep them coming back.

Businesses make mistakes all the time and a good shopper knows this. The problem comes when the mistake is handled poorly. If you ignore the issue or become defensive you have lost the sale and probably any repeat business from that customer. You also take a chance on this disgruntled customer sharing their experience with others, and they will. So, why take a chance in today’s connected world?
So, what should you do when faced with negative comments or complaints?  

The first thing you should do is apologize or recognize the error! There is nothing wrong with recognizing the mistake and acknowledging it took place. 

Next, you should see how you can quickly rectify the situation. Yes, that bad comment is out there for everyone to see but so is your response.

If you handle your response well it can show other potential customers that you care and you have the customer’s best interest at heart. They like it when you care.

Make your customers happy no matter what it takes

It also shows you’re involved with your customer base. Just because you’re doing business online doesn’t mean you can’t see eye to eye. If you make yourself available to your buying public you can’t go wrong. You can achieve this by utilizing some of the social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, a blog and forums.

If you ask me, the web is just another way to provide great customer service and support for your products. Remember, good customer service keeps people coming back. Just because they are shopping online doesn’t mean you can’t treat them like they were standing right in front of you.

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Here is a video tutorial on how to use Google’s free keyword research tool. It can show you all kinds of helpful data by showing you the keywords that searchers are actually typing in to find you. It can also tell you how many people are searching for those words as well as search trends for the year.

Check out this video tutorial on how to use Google’s free keyword research tool. This video compliments the e-book Market Research on a Dime. So if you don’t have it yet fill out your name and email on the right side of this post so you can get a better look at how to correctly do keyword research.

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In part 2 the title tags were completely unfocused, over the 65 character limit, and not at all compelling or written for a human to actually read and click through. Title tags like this will result in your page being penalized for keyword stuffing.

As we discussed in part 1 a better strategy would be to create compelling keyword rich content, under the 65 character limit, using the exact keyword phrase up front and then a variation of that keyword in the middle or towards the end of the tag. We also put the company name at the end of the tag or better yet, left it out all together.

Now, in part 3 we are going to take a look at the best practices for using your keywords in your title tags. The first and most important thing to remember is to focus one keyword per page. Yup, that’s right- One & only one keyword per page with secondary or supporting keywords sprinkled throughout the pages content. Creating unique pages for each of the targeted keyword gives you the opportunity to rank for more pages thus giving you more real estate in the search engines.

For example, a page for dog collars, another page targeting dog leashes, another for dog harnesses and so on—rather than trying to pack everything into a single title tag. Supporting keywords for the dog collars page would be designer dog collars and fashion dog collars. When deciding on whether to target the singular or plural version of the keyword phrase you will need to take a look at your keyword research and focus on the one with the highest search volume.

Avoiding Duplicate Content in Title Tags

Another very and often used title tag mistake is not giving every web page a unique title. If you have duplicate title tags within your site, you risk having your pages banished to Google’s elusive and supposedly non-existent supplemental index. That would be the online equivalent of being sent to search engine nowhere land.

Ok, so you’re probably wondering what is the worst title tag mistake you can make and if not I’m going to tell you any way. The worst title tag mistake you can make is NO TITLE TAG AT ALL. Believe it or not web designers and business owner who have taken it apon themselves to optimize there website still fail to put anything in their title tag.

Not putting any title tag whatsoever will cause “Untitled Document” to be displayed as your page title in the search results. Surprisingly, there are over 34 million pages in the Google index that have “Untitled Document” as their title.

The same can be said for page titles like Welcome to our homepage, Company Name or index. Also, creating unique pages for keyword variations is something you want to avoid. Making different pages using keyword variations like dog collar, dog collars, and collars for dogs will dilute your keyword effectiveness. Besides how much unique content can you come up with for each of those terms. It is best practice to use those keyword variations as supporting keywords rather than creating unique pages for each.

The good thing is if you’ve been making these title tag mistakes it’s not too late to improve them using the SEO tips you’ve learned in these last 3 posts on Title Tag Do’s and Don’t’s

Please feel free to leave comments or ask questions if you need any further help with proper title tag optimization.

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According to Search Engine News “Your success with using repetition and variation will be somewhat dependent upon your specific target keywords as well as the degree of competition within your niche.”

Making sure to master these title tag elements correctly is critical to ranking successfully at the top of the SERP’s. Experience shows us that implementing these minor tweaks in the title tag can make the difference between a first and second page listing. So, you should experiment with your title tags (staying within these guidelines) to get the best possible results from this critically important on-page optimization strategy.

Stupid Title Tags Mistakes to Avoid

Ok, now that you know what a good title tag looks like, take a look at some examples of a poorly written title tag.

Bad title tag example
Doggy Word – Best Prices in Collars for Your Dog

The title tags above contains a number of mistakes. First, the company name is placed first, it does not use the exact keyword phrase (Collars for Your Dog is not the same as Dog Collars), it fails to repeat a variation of the keyword, and finally it places the keyword phrase at the end of the title tag. These are common title tag mistakes you should avoid at all times.

Let’s take a look at some other stupid title tag mistakes

Really bad title tag
Dog Collars, Dog Collars, Dog Collars, Dog Collars, Dog Collars, Dog Collars, Dog Collars, Dog Collars, Dog Collars, Dog Collars

STOP THAT! Repeating keywords over and over can get your web page penalized causing you to loose rankings. While it is acceptable to use slight variations of your targeted keyword phrase and/or even repeat it later in the title tag, never repeat it more than twice… and one repetition usually works just fine.

For more on proper title tag optimization stay tuned for Title Tag Do’s & Don’ts Part 3

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This is the on-page source code element that continues to be the primary element that the search engines use to determine what keywords your page is actually about—and ranks your pages accordingly. We are also talking about the descriptive element within the SERPs that people use when choosing which link to click.

So, let’s take a minute to make sure you’re getting this important element of keyword placement correct.

The best title tags focus on three characteristics.

1. They include the exact phrase the page should rank for.
2. They place that exact phrase at the very beginning of the title.
3. They repeat that phrase in some variation within the tag.

Let’s say your goal is a top ranking for the search term Dog Collars. Take a look at a couple of very good title tag examples:
good title tag

Dog Collars – Find the Best Collars for Your Dog – Doggy World
good title tag

Dog Collars – Find the Best dog collar at Doggy World

As you can see both of these title tags place the most important keyword phrase at the very beginning of the title tag. Then you want to strategically reinforce the main keyword with a closely related variation of the keyword. By doing so you are helping to boost the ranking for the closely related keyword-phrase variations. In the first example we repeat the exact phrase while the second uses a slight variation of the phrase to repeat the target keywords. Both strategies are excellent.

When deciding to target a singular or plural version, or to pursue word-order variations, you should consider two factors:

* Your keyword research — How much traffic are those related keywords getting?
* Your competitive analysis — How hard will it be to outrank the competition for those keywords?

Keep in mind that the example title tags above are kept under the 65-character limit Google uses when displaying titles in their search results. While the Google bots will spider (but not display) titles of well over 1000 characters, they will crop longer title tags off mid-sentence when displaying them to users. This will result in unattractive title tags that will lower click-through rates.

As you can also see, the company name—Doggy World is placed at the end of the title where it will interfere less with the importance of your primary keywords. It is debatable as to whether the company name belongs in the title tag at all. It is a fact that the company name does not belong at the beginning of the title unless, for some strange reason, your company name is also your target keyword.

It is usually unnecessary to put your company name in the title tag at all. This is because your company name is not a competitive keyword. Nor should it be difficult to rank for. In general, the only good reason for adding a company name to a title tag is for branding purposes. This is an important title tag fact to keep in mind.

Stay tuned for part 2 of Title Tag Do’s & Don’ts.

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You can have quality interactions with only so many people, and after that what you have is audience to broadcast to. If that many people want to hear what you say, good for them (and good for you, too).
Use Mr. Tweet to find other people on Twitter in your marketing niche and follow them. Many will follow you back, and they’re relevant to you and your existing followers.

Engage in conversations with top tweeters. Top tweeters are people who tweet a lot and who also have a lot of followers. The more followers a person has, the more likely those followers are to notice you, and the more likely they are to follow you.
Ask your followers to recommend you to their followers. This one takes a little guts, but if you know the other person well enough, there’s nothing wrong with it. Most people are happy to do this for you, they just didn’t think of it. You can do this via reciprocal arrangement through DMs.
Ask your blog readers to follow you on Twitter. And along the same lines, put a widget on your blog that has your latest tweets and/or the count of your Twitter followers.
Put a link to your Twitter profile page in the biography you include when you submit guest posts to other blogs (which means you should be guest-posting on other blogs).
Leave comments on blogs that let you include your twitter name, such as TwiTip by ProBlogger Darren Rowse.
Sign up for TweetBeep, a service similar to Google Alerts, but for tweets. This will help you go where the conversations are happening that you’re interested in. Engaging with others will get you more followers.

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