Let’s talk about one of the more “popular” mistakes that I see being made with business websites owned by “Mom and Pop” type businesses. And how to fix it.

The mistake is to get the page title wrong. And it’s so easy to fix.

Firstly, what do I mean by the title? It’s the text that appears in the blue bar at the very top of your screen. It is controlled by a simple little piece of HTML code that looks like this:

<title>Home</title>

You can see the HTML code for any webpage by right clicking over any blank part of the page and then clicking on “View source” or similar words, depending on which browser you are using.

Your webmaster can easily change the text that appears there, between what’s called the opening and closing title tags.

What should you be saying in your title?

Definitely not “Home”. That’s missing a huge opportunity to help the search engines know what your web page is about.

What you should do is to use some of your keywords. These are the terms that describe the topic of your site. These are the words you want your site to be found for in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

For example, if your site is about organic gardening in planter boxes, those are the exact words I’d want to see inside your title tags. That’s a good “keyphrase” as we call it because it’s specific. Just to say “gardening” would be too broad. Narrow it down as much as possible so you get targeted visitors, people who want exactly what you are offering.

Then do yourself a favor and use Capital Case. That is, render the first letter of each word in upper case. Like so…

<title>Organic Gardening In Planter Boxes</title>

Why? It just looks better. Okay, one school of thought says to forget the capital for the unimportant words such as “in” in this case. Over to you on that one.

MAIN POINT: The title tag is designed to tell both the search engines and the human visitors exactly what your page is about. Make sure it fulfills its mission.

Result: The search engines will reward you with more targeted traffic… assuming the page itself is also about organic gardening in planter boxes.

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One more advanced technique is to use TWO of your keyphrases together as your title.

Typically you might put your primary keyphrase first, followed by a punctuation marker of some kind, followed by one of your secondary (less important) keyphrases. For example:

<title>Organic Gardening In Planter Boxes - Growing Geraniums On Low Sunlight Decks</title>

If you’re a gardener, you might have guessed that I know very little about geraniums or gardening in general but I hope the SEO (search engine optimization) point is clear enough. And I hope it helps you avoid one of the most popular SEO blunders.

Cheers… and many happy titles to you too!

Gary

- Written by Gary Harvey, http://PageOneWithGary.com







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