When it comes to promoting your business, there are some strategies that take time to build, while others are quick to implement and can have a big impact. this is the top-right quadrant, the low-hanging fruit that anyone running a business hopes to find. One such strategy can be, quite simply, naming the titles of your pages. Page titles are one important place to indicate to a search engine what the content of your page is about. Page titles are displayed both on the top left corner of your browser window and as the page title on the search result listing.
Use the following five guidelines when coming up with titles for each of your pages. Make sure that:
1. Each page has a unique title
2. Titles are rich in keywords. To help determine which keywords may be important to focus on you can do some simple keyword research using SEO Book’s keyword tool.
3. Titles are not overly long. To avoid keyword stuffing, a practice frowned up on by search engines, your goal should be to optimize different pages for different keywords so you are not trying to unnaturally insert all your important keywords in your page titles and copy.
4. The content of your page, your copy, matches the title. Do not write an appealing title simply because you think it sounds catchy or has some good keywords. Make sure that your title is representative of the content of your page in order to make it relevant for search engines.
5. Place the more important terms closer to the front of your title. If you are a small business with a brand that is not yet well known chances are most of your traffic will be coming from people searching for your product using generic terms. Place your company name at the end of your title then. For example, if you have a coffee shop called Mercury and you sell organic coffee, one page description could be Organic Coffee – Mercury. People are more likely to search for the term organic coffee than for your brand.
While titles may not be the holy grail of SEO, they are a very important (and not very costly) way of optimizing your pages for search engines. Be sure to follow the guidelines above and you will be well on your way to improving your organic traffic.
Tags: Online Marketing, SEO, Small Business, titles
