“Help! I don't have much time to optimize! What can I do?”
If you’re a small business owner who also
has the lovely task of managing your own website, then you may have found
yourself in this situation….you know you need to do some search engine
optimization but you just don’t have the time to do it all. Of course
the first thing
I’m going to
tell you is to give us a call and we’ll
handle it for you, but let’s say that’s not yet an option.
What I would tell you to do is to
take a good hard look at
your web page title tags!
What are title tags you ask? In laymen’s
terms, title tags are the HTML tags at the top of a web page that tell the
browser what the page is about. You know, look up at the very top of the
browser window and at the left you’ll see some text about that page; well, that’s the title tag. It serves two main purposes 1) when
displayed in the browser it helps human users identify what the page is about,
and 2) it gives search engines an indication of what they can expect to find on
that page as well.
Good title tags are arguably one of the
most important aspects of SEO. Search Engines such as Google place a fair amount
of value in these little guys! They are also one of the easiest tactics for people to both comprehend and employ. What
is important is
that you know which key words are
important to your business, as well as which ones
are relevant to that particular page. You’ll definitely want to create UNIQUE
title tags for EACH page on your web site. Be sure to examine each page’s
content carefully so that the title tags are reflective of the content message
on the page. Whatever you do don’t put in keywords that are not relevant to the
page content. This will not help you, your visitors, or the search engines! Try
to include one or two keywords/phrases in each title tag. Remember to keep them
fairly short as most search engines only support 50 to 70 characters.
Finally, have a good look at the content
on the page and try logically insert these same keywords in to the content.
You’ll want to have a nice keyword density on the page. I say 'logically' and 'nice', because you don’t want to overdo it
and end up spamming your own web site with keywords. Just let it come naturally.
Of course there are dozens of more
incredible things that you can do to improve your search engine
optimization, such as inbound linking,
page renaming and alt tags to name a few, but if you’re strapped for time and
budget, you can’t go wrong with this approach! Good luck!
