Improve Search Engine Ranking:
Your website title may be hurting your rankings
By Joe Duchesne
Improve search engine ranking by improving your website title. Are you making these common mistakes when choosing titles for your web pages?
The title of your website performs the same function to your website that a headline in a newspaper does for the article it describes. Think about the last time you read a newspaper. How did you decide which stories to read? Wasn't it because the headline grabbed your interest?
Let's face it. We're all too busy to read every article we come across or every website we come across at length to decide if it is something that is of interest to us. How do we cut through this noise to fund what we need quickly? Through the use of headlines. On a website, the headline is our website title. Both the title at the very top of the browser and the first words on our web page.
How to affect Search Engine Titles
Perform any search on the internet and there are usually no shortage of listings that come up. We then scan the listings to find something of interest. While scanning, the text that jumps out at us are the links. How does a search engine determine what text will find its way in the link? By your website title. That's the text between the HTML title tags.
Grab the Searchers Attention or they are gone!
Most studies have shown that you have only a few seconds to make a good first impression. Once someone has actually visited your website, they have often taken a few steps to get there. If the traffic came from a search engine, the visitor actually had to type in a set of keywords, browse through a list of websites searching for something relevant to what they are looking for, click on it, and finally end up on your website. Once there what will they find?
Common Title Mistakes
1. Lack of Clear Purpose for Website: You need to know exactly the kind of customer you want to land on your website. Once you know that, you write the content on your website to speak to that person. Many webmasters forget this and have no clear focus to their site.
2. No keywords in title: Get higher search engine ranking by including your most relevant keywords first. Too many sites make the mistake of having only their company name in their title or worse, having a 'welcome to my website' type of message.
3. No clear benefit to staying on website: The best way to communicate the reason why your visitor needs to take time for your website is to have an effective title for your site.
4. Really long website title: The more words you add to your title the more you add confusion. Further than that though, the more you dilute the importance of the keywords included in your title. Keep your title as short as possible while still allowing it to make sense.
5. Generic Title that gets lost in the crowd: It may seem like a good idea to only include your keywords and nothing else in the title. If the keyword you are targeting is three or more words, this may work. Keep in mind however, that other websites will be doing the same things. If your website title consists of only the keyword, you may get lost in the crowd. When someone else is more descriptive, they'll get the clicks and not you.
Improve search engine ranking through the proper use of your website title. Keep it focused on your main keyword while giving the visitor a reason to stay. Provide your visitor with what they are looking for and your website will have taken a giant leap towards success.
