Marbella SEO
Posts Tagged ‘Page Optimization’
Tips For Success – Title Tags
The Key To Successful Website Optimization
When fixing articles for SEO the title tags are of vital importance, the very first step to getting your page ranking higher in any search. The title tag is the first thing the Google spider recognises on your website and enables it to go “Oh. This website is about such and such”. We know there is a whole algorithm that Google uses to compile and calculate where it’s going to rank websites. First it sends its spiders out, crawls the website, puts it into its index and then they have their big computers that do all the number crunching from all the analysis that they’ve done, compared to their algorithm. Their algorithm looks for what’s on the page and what’s off the page with title tag being it’s first point of call.
We’ll look at on-page optimization. Consider a standard html page, a normal website with navigation, with a little banner at the top, with some links and a title and body copy. If we break that down even more and look at the on page factors that we need to have in place. The most important is we need to do keyword research to select the keyword. We need title keywords that we’re sure other people are searching for. There is no point in ranking title tags for something really obscure if no one is searching for that keyword.
Use the free Google keyword research tool. Put in your broad phrase for your title tag. Say we’re doing soccer drills, type in ’soccer drills’ which would be your broad phrase and you could look for your keywords that you are trying to optimize underneath that. Each page will only ever get to be optimized for one keyword at any one point in time. You don’t want to optimize for multiple keywords, otherwise you confuse Google on what you are trying to do.
Have a check at, for example, the keyword ‘wine supplies’. So let’s say we’ve done our keyword research. On our main home page typically what we’ll do is optimize for a keyword that is more competitive and harder to rank. In this example, on the home page we are ranking our title tag for ‘making wine’. For our internal pages we are looking for slightly longer tail keywords. An example could be ‘wine supplies’.
If you think of our typical html page, starting at the very top at the title tag and moving our way down. One of the first things we will see is the title tag. We have chosen our keyword as ‘wine supplies’. You will have to have the keyword in the title tag. But we have to remember where this information is going to appear. It’s going to appear at the top. It will also appear in the search engine. If we’re looking at our search results, the title of the page will appear with a blue underline.
That is your title tag, and Google, when it crawls your page, will get those tags. The title keywords are vitally important for multiple reasons. Firstly we need the keyword in the title tag because the user who is typing that keyword into Google has said I am interested in wine supplies. If they’re interested in answers to wine supplies, if something comes up that says ‘Wine Supplies Australia’, and another one comes up that says ‘Soccer Drills’ they’re obviously going to go for wine supplies because that is something that grabs their attention.
So you see having your primary keyword in this tag forms the basis for all SEO essentials. If you only do one thing for getting your site ranking in SEO, make sure it’s getting your title tags spot on by using keywords that your users are searching for and making it as attention grabbing as possible. Keyword research tools are important for this.
Should My Site Optimze for Bing as well as Google?
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Winning the search results game on the Google search engine is every marketer’s Nirvana. SEO Consultants usually focus on what it takes to win on Google because that is simply where most search activity takes place. Even though Google controls the market for internet search, the other engines are useful.
Google is of course the dominant player in internet search and is entitled to the most attention. Currently, at least 80% or more of all searches are run on Google. Some have calculated that this could be as high as 90%. The Google search engine is simple, powerful and most users prefer it by significant margins. Will the current situation ever change? Possibly.
Yahoo! against Google has so far been a one-sided battle as Yahoo has not won over many Google users. The Bing seach system has been upgraded, had a face lift and has supposedly improved its search delivery system. The Bing marketing team refers to the Google search results “overload” and has produced some decent promotional campaigns surrounding it. Bing provides access to Microsoft’s very useful Virtual Earth mapping platform as well as other features. (Microsoft’s Virtual Earth is a world-class mapping platform offering clear aerial imagery and othe supeior functionality).)
From the consumer’s standpoint though, Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ search engine essentially functions the same as Google, and attempts to deliver the user exactly what the user wants without ancillary and possibly irrelevant page links. The paid and sponsored results that crowd a Google results page are not present on Bing.
Does the future of internet search belong then to Bing? Probably not, but this is America and anything can happen. Realistically though, unless Google drives users away somehow, the other providers will have difficulty making a dent in the Google market share. By controlling 80% of all search traffic, Google squeezes its competitors into a very small – 20% sized- market space.
In cases of similar search requests, do various engines produce the same results? Search engines elsewhere will display results different from those found on Google. Even though search processes differ, a page with a strong Google ranking generally ranks well on the other search engines. New Pages occasionally appear well placed or ranked highly on Yahoo! and Bing but will hardly register on Google, as Google seems to rank new pages more slowly for some search terms than the other two main competitors.
You would be well served to treat optimization the same across all search engine platforms – at least until another competitor with new features emerges that requires techniques different from what Google currently requires. Yahoo and Bing typically respond to a well optimzied page much as Google does, although freqently much more rapidly! Optimization methods useful for Google are also useful for other engines.
Value may be gained by keeping track of your results in Yahoo! and Bing – especially for younger pages. Often, new page appear as result links more rapidly on Yahoo! and Bing – which serves the remaining search request traffic.
Time spent trying to understand search engines other than Google is probably time wasted. The key elements will always be:
- Useful content,
- Relevant links,
- Frequent updates.
Stick to these fundamentals and select your keywords carefully, and over time, your page should compete well on all search engines.
Denver SEO Consultants provide assistance to businesses utilizing the internet to improve sales and win new customers. Visit our SEO blog to learn more! Find out how even a small HVAC business page wins new customers using local Search Engine Marketing methodologies.